mtt
by Laddie252
Summary: ...
1. Chapter 1

Here is the boy, drowning.  
In these last moments, it's not the water that's finally done for him; it's the cold. It has bled all the  
energy from his body and contracted his muscles into a painful uselessness, no matter how much he  
fights to keep himself above the surface. He is strong, and young, nearly seventeen, but the wintry  
waves keep coming, each one seemingly larger than the last. They spin him round, topple him over,  
force him deeper down and down. Even when he can catch his breath in the few terrified seconds he  
manages to push his face into the air, he is shaking so badly he can barely get half a lungful before  
he's under again. It isn't enough, grows less each time, and he feels a terrible yearning in his chest as  
he aches, fruitlessly, for more.  
He is in full panic now. He knows he's drifted just slightly too far from shore to make it back, the  
icy tide pulling him out farther and farther with every wave, pushing him toward the rocks that make  
this bit of coast so treacherous. He also knows there is no one who'll notice he's gone in time, no one  
who'll raise the alarm before the water defeats him. He won't be saved by chance, either. There are  
no beachcombers or tourists to dive in from the shoreline to save him, not this time of year, not in  
these freezing temperatures.  
It is too late for him.  
He will die.  
And he will die alone.  
The sudden, gasping horror of knowing this makes him panic even more. He tries again to break the  
surface, not daring to think that it might be his last time, not daring to think much at all. He forces his  
legs to kick, forces his arms to heave himself upward, to at least get his body the right way round, to  
try and grasp another breath just inches away –  
But the current is too strong. It allows him tantalizingly near the surface but spins him upside down  
before he can get there, dragging him closer to the rocks.  
The waves toy with him as he tries again.  
And fails.  
Then, without warning, the game the sea seems to have been playing, the cruel game of keeping him  
just alive enough to think he might make it, that game seems to be over.  
The current surges, slamming him into the killingly hard rocks. His right shoulder blade snaps in  
two so loudly he can hear the crack, even underwater, even in this rush of tide. The mindless intensity  
of the pain is so great that he calls out, his mouth instantly filling with freezing, briny seawater. He  
coughs against it, but only drags more into his lungs. He curves into the pain of his shoulder, blinded  
by it, paralyzed by its intensity. He is unable to even try and swim now, unable to brace himself as the  
waves turn him over once more.  
Please, is all he thinks. Just the one word, echoing through his head.  
Please.  
The current grips him a final time. It rears back as if to throw him, and it dashes him headfirst into  
the rocks. He slams into them with the full, furious weight of an angry ocean behind him. He is unable  
to even raise his hands to try and soften the blow.  
The impact is just behind his left ear. It fractures his skull, splintering it into his brain, the force of  
it also crushing his third and fourth vertebrae, severing both his cerebral artery and his spinal cord, an  
injury from which there is no return, no recovery. No chance.  
He dies.


	2. Chapter 2

The first moments after the boy's death pass for him in a confused and weighty blur. He is dimly  
aware of pain, but mostly of a tremendous fatigue, as if he has been covered in layer upon layer of  
impossibly heavy blankets. He struggles against them, blindly, his thrashing increasing as he panics  
(again) at the invisible ropes that seem to bind him.  
His mind isn't clear. It races and throbs like the worst kind of fever, and he is unaware of even  
thinking. It's more some kind of wild, dying instinct, a terror of what's to come, a terror of what's  
happened.  
A terror of his death.  
As if he can still struggle against it, still outrun it.  
He even has a distant sensation of momentum, his body continuing its fight against the waves even  
though that fight has already been lost. He feels a sudden rushing, a surge of terror hurtling him  
forward, forward, forward, but he must be free of his body somehow because his shoulder no longer  
hurts as he struggles blindly through the dark, unable to feel anything, it seems, except a terrified  
urgency to move –  
And then there is a coolness on his face. Almost as of a breeze, though such a thing seems  
impossible for so many reasons. It's this coolness that causes his consciousness – His soul? His  
spirit? Who's to say? – to pause in its fevered spin.  
For an instant, he is still.  
There's a change in the murk before his eyes. A lightness. A lightness he can enter, somehow, and  
he can feel himself leaning toward it, his body – so weak, so nearly incapable beneath him – reaching  
for the growing light.  
He falls. Falls onto solidity. The coolness rises from it, and he allows himself to sink into it, let it  
envelop him.  
He is still. He gives up his struggle. He lets oblivion overtake him.  
Oblivion is purgatorial and gray. He is passably conscious, not asleep but not quite awake either, as  
if disconnected from everything, unable to move or think or receive input, able only to exist.  
An impossible amount of time passes, a day, a year, maybe even an eternity, there is no way he can  
know. Finally, in the distance, the light begins to slowly, almost imperceptibly change. A grayness  
emerges, then a lighter grayness, and he starts to come back to himself.  
His first thought, more vaguely sensed than actually articulated, is that it feels as though he's  
pressed against a cement block. He's dimly aware of how cool it is under him, how solid it feels, like  
he's clinging to it lest he fly off into space. He hovers around the thought for an indeterminate amount  
of time, letting it clarify, letting it connect to his body, to other thoughts –  
The word morgue suddenly flashes somewhere deep inside him – for where else are you laid out  
on cool, solid blocks – and in rising horror, he opens his eyes, unaware they were even closed. He  
tries to call out that they must not bury him, they must not cut him open, that there's been a terrible,  
terrible mistake. But his throat rebels against the formation of words, as if it hasn't been used for  
years, and he's coughing and sitting up in terror, his eyes muddled and foggy, like he's looking at the  
world from behind many thick layers of dirty glass.  
He blinks repeatedly, trying to see. The vague shapes around him slowly fall into place. He sees  
that he is not on the cold slab of a morgue –  
He is –  
He is –  
Where is he?  
Confused, he squints painfully into what now seems to be rising daylight. He looks around, trying to  
take it in, trying to see it, make sense of it all.  
He seems to be lying on a concrete path that runs through the front yard of a house, stretching from  
the sidewalk to a front door behind him.  
The house is not his own.  
And there's more wrong than just that.  
He breathes for a moment, heavily, almost panting, his mind groggy, his vision slowly becoming a  
little clearer. He feels himself shaking from the chill and pulls his arms around himself, sensing a  
dampness covering his –  
Not his clothes.  
He looks down at them, his physical reaction slower than the thought that ordered it. He squints  
again, trying to see them clearly. They don't seem to really be clothes at all, just strips of white cloth  
that barely fit the name trousers or shirt, stuck closely around him more like bandages than things to  
wear. And all along one side, they're wet with –  
He stops.  
They're not wet with seawater, not with the soaking, briny cold of the ocean he was just –  
(drowning in)  
And only half of him is wet anyway. The other half, the half that was against the ground, is cool, but  
quite dry.  
He looks around, more confused than ever. Because he can only be wet with dew. The sun is low in  
the sky, and it seems as if it must be morning. Underneath him, he can even make out a dry outline of  
where he was lying.  
As if he had lain there all night.  
But that can't be. He remembers the brutal, winter coldness of the water, the dark freezing gray of  
the sky overhead that would never have let him survive a night out in it –  
But that isn't this sky. He lifts his face to it. This sky isn't even winter. The chill is merely the chill  
of morning, of possibly a warm day to come, of possibly a summer day. Nothing at all like the bitter  
wind of the beach. Nothing at all like when he –  
When he died.  
He takes another moment to breathe, to just do that, if he can. There is only quiet around him, only  
the sounds he himself is making.  
He turns slowly to look at the house again. It resolves itself more and more as his eyes get used to  
the light, used – it almost seems – to seeing again.  
And then, through the fog and confusion, he feels a soft tremor in his blanketed mind.  
A brush, a hint, a featherweight of –  
Of –  
Is it familiarity?


	3. Chapter 3

He tries to rise, and the feeling vanishes. Rising is difficult, surprisingly so, and he fails. He feels  
terrifyingly weak, his muscles resisting even the simple command to stand. Just the effort to sit fully  
upright leaves him winded, and he has to stop for a moment, panting again.  
He reaches out to grab a sturdy-looking plant by the side of the path to try to rise once more –  
And pulls his hand back immediately when short spikes prick his fingers.  
It's not a regular plant at all. It's a weed, grown staggeringly tall. The flower beds that line the path  
to the door of the house have all grown extraordinarily wild, much higher than the low stone dividing  
walls on either side. The shrubberies among them look like they're almost living creatures reaching  
out to him, poised to do him harm if he moves too close. Other weeds, enormous weeds, three, four,  
even six feet high, have blazed through every inch of dirt and every possible crack in the pavement,  
one of them crushed underneath him where he lay.  
He tries again to rise, finally making it up, though he sways dangerously for a moment. His head is  
overweighted with grogginess and he's still shivering. The white bandages around him are in no way  
warm, nor are they even – he notices with alarm – covering him properly as clothing. His legs and  
torso are wrapped tightly, his arms, too, and most of the width of his back. Bafflingly, though, the  
entire area from his belly button to the middle of his thighs is naked to the world, front and back, his  
most private parts unthinkably out in the morning sun. He frantically tries to pull down the too-scanty  
fabric to cover himself, but it sticks tightly to his skin.  
He covers himself with his hand and looks around to see if anyone has seen him.  
But there is no one. No one at all.  
Is this a dream? he thinks, the words coming to him slowly, thickly, as if from a great distance. The  
last dream before death?  
Every yard is as overgrown as this one. Some that had lawns are now sprouting fields of grass  
shoulder-high. The pavement in the road is cracked, too, with more weeds almost obscenely tall  
growing right out of the middle, a few approaching the status of trees.  
There are cars parked along the road, but they're covered in thick layers of dust and dirt, blinding  
every window. And nearly every one has sunk under four deflated tires.  
Nothing is moving. There are no cars coming down the road, and from the look of the weeds, no car  
has driven down here in an impossibly long time. The road to his left carries on until it meets a much  
wider street, one that looks like it should be a busy, bustling main road. There are no cars driving  
there either, and he can see a gigantic hole has opened up across it, forty or fifty feet wide. Out of  
which a whole glade of weeds seems to be growing.  
He listens. He can't hear a single motor anywhere. Not on this street or the next. He waits for a  
long moment. Then a long moment more. He looks down the other end of the road on his right, and  
through the gap between two apartment buildings, he can see some raised train tracks and feels  
himself listening for the trains that might run on them.  
But there are no trains.  
And no people.  
And no people.  
If it's the morning that it seems to be, people should be coming out of their houses, getting in their  
cars, driving to work. Or if not, then walking their dogs, delivering the mail, heading off to school.  
The streets should be full. Front doors should be opening and closing.  
But there is no one. No cars, no trains, no people.  
And this street, now that he can see more of it as his eyes and mind begin to clear a little more,  
even the geography of it looks strange. These houses are crammed together, all stuck in a line, with no  
garages or big front yards and only the narrowest of alleys between every fourth or fifth house.  
Nothing like his own street back home. In fact, this doesn't look like an American street at all. It looks  
almost –  
It looks almost English.  
The word clangs around his head. It feels important, like it's desperately trying to latch on to  
something, but his mind is so foggy, so shocked and confused, it only heightens his anxiety.  
It's a word that's wrong. That's very wrong.  
He wavers a little and has to catch his balance on one of the sturdier-looking bushes. He feels a  
strong urge to go inside, to find something to cover himself with, and this house, this house –  
He frowns at it.  
What is it about this house?  
Surprising himself, without even feeling as if he's decided to, he takes an unsteady step toward it,  
nearly falling. He still struggles to articulate his thoughts. He cannot say why he's walking toward the  
house, why it might be anything other than an instinct to get inside, to get out of this weird deserted  
world, but he's also aware that all of this, whatever it is, feels so much like a dream that only dream  
logic can possibly apply.  
He doesn't know why, but the house draws him.  
So he goes.  
He reaches the front steps, steps over a crack running along the lowest one, and stops before the door.  
He waits there a moment, not quite knowing what to do next, not quite sure how it will open, or what  
he will do if it's locked, but he reaches for it –  
It swings open at his lightest touch.  
A long hallway is the first thing he sees. The sun is really shining now, filling the clear blue sky  
behind him – so warm that it must be some kind of summer, so warm he can already feel it burning his  
exposed skin, too pale, too fair to be under such harsh light – but even in this brightness, the hallway  
almost disappears in darkness halfway down. He can only just see the staircase at the end, leading up  
to the floors above. Before the stairs, on the left, is the doorway that leads into the main house.  
There are no lights on inside, and no sound.  
He looks around again. There's still no drone of machinery or engines from anywhere, but he  
notices for the first time that there's no buzz of insects either, no calls of birds, not even any wind  
through the foliage.  
Nothing but the sound of his own breathing.  
He just stands there for a moment. He feels hideously unwell, and so weak, so tired, he could  
He just stands there for a moment. He feels hideously unwell, and so weak, so tired, he could  
almost lay down on this doorstep right here and sleep forever, just forever, and never wake up –  
He steps inside the house instead. Hands on either wall to keep himself steady, he moves slowly  
forward, every second thinking he's going to be stopped, that he's going to hear a voice demanding to  
know what he's doing trespassing in a strange house. As he stumbles into the shadows, though, his  
eyes not adjusting to the change in light as fast as they should, he can feel dust under his feet so thick it  
seems inconceivable that anyone has been here in a long, long time.  
It gets darker the farther in he goes, and this seems wrong somehow, the blast of the sun through the  
open door not illuminating anything, just making the shadows heavier and more threatening to his  
bleary eyes. He fumbles on, seeing less and less, reaching the bottom of the stairs but turning from  
them, still hearing nothing, no sounds of habitation, no sound of anything at all except himself.  
Alone.  
He pauses before the doorway to the living room, feeling a fresh thrust of fear. Anything could be  
there in the darkness, anything could be silently waiting for him, but he forces himself to look in,  
letting his eyes get used to the light.  
When they do, he sees.  
Caught in a few beams of dusty sunlight from the closed blinds at the front, he sees a simple, plain  
living room, merging into an open dining area on his right, leading to a doorway through to the kitchen  
at the back of the house.  
There is furniture here, like any normal room, except it's all covered in dust so thick it's like an  
extra cloth draped over everything. The boy, exhausted still, tries to make the shapes match up to  
words in his head.  
His eyes adjust to the light more, the room becoming more of itself, taking shape, revealing details

Revealing the horse screaming from above the mantelpiece.  
A crazed eye, a tongue like a spike, trapped inside a burning world, looking at him from behind a  
picture frame.  
Looking right at him.  
The boy cries out at the sight of it because all at once he knows, knows beyond a shadow of a  
doubt, the realization coming like a tidal wave.  
He knows where he is.


	4. Chapter 4

He runs as fast as his exhausted feet will take him, staggering back down the hall, stirring up clouds of  
dust, heading toward the sunshine like –  
(like a drowning man reaching for air –)  
He can vaguely hear himself calling out in distress, still wordless, still unformed.  
But he knows.  
He knows, he knows, he knows.  
He stumbles down the front steps, barely able to stay upright, and then not even barely. He falls to his  
knees and can't find the strength to rise again, as if the sudden rush of knowledge is a weight on his  
back.  
He looks to the house in panic, thinking that something, someone must be coming after him, must be  
in pursuit –  
But there's nothing.  
There's still no sound. Not of machines or people or animals or insects or anything at all. There's  
nothing but a quiet so deep he can hear his heart beating in his chest.  
My heart, he thinks. And the words come clearly, cutting through the fog in his mind.  
His heart.  
His dead heart. His drowned heart.  
He begins to shake, as the terrible knowledge of what he saw, the terrible knowledge of what it  
means, starts to overtake him.  
This is the house where he used to live.  
The house from all those years ago. The house in England. The house his mother swore she never  
wanted to see again. The house they moved across an ocean and a continent to get away from.  
But that's impossible. He hasn't seen this house, this country, in years. Not since primary school.  
Not since –  
Not since his brother got out of the hospital.  
Not since the very worst thing that ever happened.  
No, he thinks.  
Oh, please, no.  
He knows where he is now. He knows why it would be this place, knows why he would wake up  
here, after –  
After he died.  
This is hell.  
A hell built exactly for him.  
A hell where he would be alone.  
Forever.  
He's died, and woken up in his own, personal hell.  
He's died, and woken up in his own, personal hell.  
He vomits.  
He falls forward onto his hands, spitting up the contents of his stomach into the bushes on the side  
of the path. His eyes water from the effort of it, but he can still see that all he's throwing up is a  
weird, clear gel that tastes vaguely of sugar. It keeps coming until he exhausts himself, and since his  
eyes are already watering, it seems only a very short step to weeping. He begins to cry, slumping  
back down to the concrete face-first.  
It feels, for a time, like drowning all over again, the yearning for breath, the struggle against  
something larger than himself that only wants to take him down with it, and there's no fighting it,  
nothing that can be done to stop it, as it swallows him up and he disappears. Lying on the path, he  
gives himself over to it, in the same way that the waves kept demanding that he give himself to them –  
(though he did fight the waves, up until the very end, he did)  
And then the exhaustion that's threatened him since he first opened his eyes overtakes him, and he  
falls into unconsciousness.  
Falls away and away and away –


	5. Chapter 5

"How long are we going to sit here?" Monica asked from the backseat. "I'm fucking freezing."  
"Does your girlfriend ever shut up, Harold?" Gudmund teased, looking into the rearview  
mirror.  
"Don't call me Harold," H said, his voice low.  
Monica slapped him on the shoulder. "That was the part of the sentence you didn't like?"  
"You're the one who wanted to come along," H said.  
"And what a blast it's turned out to be," Monica said. "Parked outside Callen Fletcher's house  
waiting for his parents to go to bed so we can steal his Baby Jesus. You sure know how to treat a  
girl, Harold."  
The backseat lit up as Monica started furiously tapping the screen of her phone.  
"Turn that off!" Gudmund said, reaching back from the driver's seat to cover it with his hand.  
"They'll see the light."  
Monica snatched it out of his grasp. "Please, we're miles away." She went back to tapping.  
Gudmund shook his head and frowned at H in the rearview mirror. It was weird. They all liked  
H. They all liked Monica. But it turned out nobody much liked H and Monica together. Not even, it  
seemed, H and Monica.  
"What are we going to do with it, anyway?" Monica said, still tapping. "I mean, Baby Jesus?  
Really? Isn't that just a little blasphemous?"  
Gudmund pointed out through the windshield. "Isn't that?"  
They looked out to the vast Christmas scene that blanketed the Fletchers' front yard like an  
invasion force. Word was that Mrs. Fletcher was angling not just for Halfmarket's local paper, but  
an actual TV news crew over from Portland, maybe even Seattle.  
The display started with Santa and all his reindeer in bright fiberglass, lit up from the inside  
and strung from a tree near the Fletcher house out to their roof so it looked like the over-burdened  
sleigh was coming in for a landing. Things got worse from there. Lights sprang from every  
conceivable crevice and outcropping on the house to every tree branch and telephone pole within  
reach. Ten-foot-tall candy canes made a forest through which mechanical elves waved onlookers  
slowly into eternity. Off to one side, there was a live, twenty-foot Christmas tree decked out like a  
cathedral next to a lawn full of prancing Christmas-related animals (including, inexplicably, a  
rhinoceros in a Santa cap).  
In pride of place was a Nativity that made it look as if God had been born in Las Vegas: Mary  
and Joseph, complete with manger, hay, lowing cattle, bowing shepherds, and rejoicing angels  
who looked like they'd stopped mid –dance routine.  
Right in the center, surrounded by them all, was the spotlit, golden-haloed infant, lifting his  
hands beatifically toward the peace of all mankind. It was rumored he was carved from imported  
Venetian marble. This would turn out to be tragically false.  
"Well, he's small enough to be portable, is your Baby Jesus," H explained to Monica, who  
wasn't really listening.  
"Easy to grab in one swoop," Gudmund said. "Easier than that rhinoceros anyway. What the  
hell's up with that?"  
"And then you bury him waist deep in someone else's lawn," H continued, raising his hands like  
"And then you bury him waist deep in someone else's lawn," H continued, raising his hands like  
the Baby Jesus statue as if he were sticking halfway out of the ground.  
"And voilà," Gudmund finished, smiling. "A Christmas miracle."  
Monica rolled her eyes. "Can't we just do meth like everybody else?"  
The whole car laughed. Yep, everyone was going to be a lot happier when she and H broke up  
and it could all be normal again.  
"It's almost eleven," Monica said, reading her phone. "I thought you said –"  
Before she could finish, they were plunged into darkness as the entire Fletcher display shut off  
in obedience to the county-ordered curfew the neighbors had gone to court to obtain. Even from  
where they were parked down the gravel road from the house, they could hear shouts of  
disappointment from the last of the chain of cars that had spent the evening driving leisurely by.  
(Callen Fletcher, a tall, awkward boy, spent the time from Thanksgiving to New Year  
desperately trying not to be noticed in any way at school. He was usually unsuccessful.)  
"All right, then," Gudmund said, rubbing his hands together. "We just wait for the cars to clear,  
and then we make our move."  
"This is theft, you know," Monica said. "They're bonkers over that display, and if Baby Jesus  
suddenly goes missing –"  
"They'll go apeshit," H laughed.  
"They'll press charges," Monica said.  
"We're not going to take him far," Gudmund said, and then he added, mischievously, "I thought  
Summer Blaydon's house could use a holy visitation."  
Monica looked shocked for a moment, then seemingly couldn't stop herself from grinning back.  
"We'll have to be careful that we don't interrupt some late-night cheerleading practice or  
something."  
"I thought you said it was theft," Gudmund said.  
"I did," Monica shrugged, still grinning. "I didn't say I minded."  
"Hey!" H snapped at her. "You gonna flirt with him all night or what?"  
"Everyone shut up anyway," Gudmund said, turning back. "It's almost time."  
There was a silence then, as they waited. The only sound was the squeak of H rubbing his sleeve  
on the window to clear it of condensation. Gudmund's leg bounced up and down in anticipation.  
The cars thinned out to nothing on the road, and still the silence ruled as they held their breath  
without knowing they were doing it.  
At last, the street was empty. The Fletchers' porch light clicked off.  
Gudmund let out a long exhalation and turned to the backseat with a serious look. H nodded  
back to him. "Let's do it," he said.  
"I'm coming, too," Monica said, putting her phone away.  
"Never thought you wouldn't," Gudmund said, smiling.  
He turned to the person sitting in the passenger's seat.  
"You ready, Seth?" he asked.


	6. Chapter 6

Seth opens his eyes.  
He's still lying on the concrete path, curled up into himself, feeling cramped and stiff against the  
hard surface. For a moment, he doesn't move.  
Seth, he thinks. Seth is my name.  
It seems a surprise, as if he'd forgotten it until the dream or the memory or whatever the hell it was  
that just happened. It had been so clear it's almost painful to recall it. And the sudden rush of  
information that comes with it is painful, too. Not just his name. No, not just that.  
He had been right there, so much more vividly than any memory or dream would have been. He  
had actually been there, with them. With H and Monica. With Gudmund, who had a car so always  
drove. His friends. On the night they stole the Baby Jesus out of Callen Fletcher's front yard.  
Not two months ago.  
Seth, he thinks again. The name slips from his brain strangely, like sand held in an open palm. I am  
Seth Wearing.  
I was Seth Wearing.  
He takes a deep breath, and his nostrils fill with a gag-making smell from where he was sick in the  
bushes. He sits up. The sun is higher in the sky. He's been out for a while, but it doesn't feel like noon  
yet.  
If there is a noon in this place. If time means anything here.  
His head is pounding badly, and even in the confusion of memories laying heavily on him, he  
becomes aware of a powerful new feeling, one he realizes he's felt all along but can now put a  
description to, a word, now that things are clearing, now that he knows his own name.  
Thirst. He's thirsty. More thirsty than he can ever remember. So much so it drives him almost  
immediately to his feet. Once more, he's shaky as he stands, but he steadies himself and manages to  
stay upright. He realizes it's what had driven him into the house before, an unnameable, undeniable  
urge.  
Now that it's named, it feels even more undeniable.  
He looks again at the strange, silent, empty neighborhood around him, with its layers of dust and  
mud. The familiarity that had hinted itself before is much firmer, much clearer now.  
His street, yes, where he'd lived when he was small, a street that had been his home. To the left it  
led up to the High Street with all its shops, and he can remember now, too, the commuter trains off to  
the right. More, he can remember counting them. On those early mornings, just before they moved  
from this little English suburb all the way across the world to the freezing coast of the Pacific  
Northwest, when he used to lie awake, unsleeping, counting trains, as if that would help.  
His younger brother's bed empty across the room.  
He winces at the memory of that summer and pushes it away.  
Because it's summer now, isn't it?  
He turns to the house again.  
His old house.  
Unmistakably, his old house.  
It looks weather-beaten and untended, the paint peeling away from the window frames, the walls  
stained from leaky gutters, just like every other house on this street. At some point, the chimney has  
partially collapsed onto the roof, a small rubble of bricks and dust scattered down the slope to the  
edge, as if no one ever noticed it falling.  
Which maybe no one has.  
How? he thinks, struggling to organize coherent thoughts against his thirst. How can this possibly  
be?  
The need for water is almost like a living creature inside him now. He's never felt anything like it  
before, his tongue fat and dry in his mouth, his lips cracked and chapped, bleeding as he tries to lick  
them damp.  
The house looms there, as if waiting for him. He doesn't want to go back inside, not even a little  
bit, but there is nothing else to do. He must drink. He must. The front door is still open from where he  
ran out before, panicked. He remembers the shock of what awaited him above the mantelpiece, like a  
punch to the gut, telling him just exactly what hell he'd woken up to –  
But he also remembers the dining area leading on from the sitting room, and the kitchen beyond that.  
The kitchen.  
With its taps.  
He moves slowly to the doorway again, coming up the three front steps, now recognizing the crack in  
the bottom one, a crack never quite serious enough to get fixed.  
He looks into his house and the memories keep coming. The long hallway, still shrouded in  
shadow, is one he crossed countless times as a young boy, tumbling down stairs he can now just  
barely see in the deepness of the house. He remembers that they lead up to the bedrooms on the floor  
above and continue up farther still, to the attic.  
The attic that used to be his old bedroom. The one he shared with Owen. The one he shared with  
Owen before –  
He stops the thought again. The thirst is nearly bending him double.  
He must drink.  
Seth must drink.  
He thinks his name again. Seth. I am Seth.  
And I will speak.  
"Hello?" he says, and the word is sharply painful, the thirst turning his throat into a desert.  
"Hello?" he tries again, a bit louder. "Is anyone there?"  
There's no answer. And still no sound, nothing but his breathing to let him know he hasn't gone  
deaf.  
He stands at the doorway, not moving yet. It's harder this time to go in, much harder, his fear a  
palpable thing, fear of what else he might find inside, fear of why he's here, of what it means.  
Of what it will mean. Forever and ever.  
But the thirst is palpable, too, and he forces himself over the threshold, stirring up the dust again.  
His bandages are no longer anything approaching white, and his skin is streaked with dark stains. He  
heads deeper inside, stopping just before the bottom of the stairs. He tries the light switch there, but it  
flips on and off pointlessly, no lights coming on anywhere. He turns from the stairs, not willing to  
brave the darkness of them just yet, not even really wanting to look at them, just gathering his courage  
before entering the living room.  
He takes a deep, dry breath, coughing again at the dust.  
He takes a deep, dry breath, coughing again at the dust.  
And steps through the doorway.


	7. Chapter 7

It is as he left it. Scattered rays of sunlight are the only illumination, since the light switches don't  
work in this room either. A room filled, he now fully realizes, with the furniture of his childhood.  
There are the stained red settees, one big, one small, that his father wasn't going to replace until the  
boys got old enough not to mess them up anymore.  
Settees that got left behind in England when they moved to America, left behind in this house.  
But here is a coffee table that didn't get left behind, a coffee table that should be thousands and  
thousands of miles from here.  
I don't understand, he thinks. I don't understand.  
He sees a vase of his mother's that made the trip. He sees an ugly end table that didn't. And there,  
above the mantelpiece –  
He feels the same stabbing in his gut despite knowing what to expect.  
It's the painting made by his uncle, the painting that came to America, too, with some of this  
furniture. It's of a shrieking, wrongly proportioned horse with terror in its eyes and that awful spike  
for its tongue. His uncle had patterned it after Picasso's Guernica, surrounding the horse with broken  
skies and broken, bombed-out bodies.  
Seth had long since been told about the real Guernica by his father, long since understood the story  
behind it, but even though his uncle's version was the palest of pale imitations, it was the first  
painting Seth had ever properly seen, the first real painting his then-five-year-old mind had tried to  
figure out. For that reason, it loomed larger for him than any classic ever would.  
It is something out of a nightmare, something horrible and hysterical, something unable to listen to  
reason or understand mercy.  
And it is a painting he last saw yesterday, if yesterday still means anything. If time passed at all in  
hell. Whatever the answer, it was a painting he saw on his way out of his own house on the other side  
of the world, the last thing his eyes had glanced over as he shut his front door.  
His actual front door. Not this. Not this nightmare version out of a past he'd prefer not to  
remember.  
He watches the painting as long as he can bear, long enough to try and turn it into just a painting,  
nothing more than that, but he can feel his heart thudding as he looks away from it, his eyes avoiding a  
dining-room table he also recognizes, and the bookcases full of books, some of whose titles he's read  
in another country than this. He shuffles as quickly as his weak body will carry him into the kitchen,  
keeping his thoughts only on his thirst. He heads straight to the sink, almost whimpering with  
anticipated relief.  
When he turns on the taps and nothing happens, he lets out an involuntary cry of despair. He tries  
them again. One won't move at all, and the other just spins in his hand, producing nothing, no matter  
how often he twists it.  
He can feel a weeping rising in him again, his eyes burning at how salty the tears are in his  
dehydrated body. He feels so weak, so unsteady that he has to lean forward and put his forehead  
against the counter, feeling its dusty coolness on his brow and hoping he won't faint.  
Of course this is what hell would be like, he thinks. Of course it is. To always be thirsty but have  
nothing to drink. Of course.  
It's probably punishment for the Baby Jesus thing. Monica had even said so. He feels a rueful  
It's probably punishment for the Baby Jesus thing. Monica had even said so. He feels a rueful  
flutter in his stomach, remembering that night again, remembering his friends, how relaxed and easy  
everything usually was, how they liked that he was the quiet one, how it hadn't mattered that the  
differences in English and American curriculum meant that he was nearly a year younger than them all  
despite being in the same grade, how they – but especially Gudmund – included him in everything as  
only friends could. Even the theft of a deity.  
They'd stolen it, almost shamefully easily, their stifled laughter the only real threat to getting  
caught. They'd lifted the infant out of the manger, surprised at its lightness, and carried it, barely able  
to contain their hysteria, back to Gudmund's car. They'd been so nervous in the getaway that a light  
had come on in the Fletcher house as they peeled down the road.  
But they'd done it. And then they'd driven out to the head cheerleader's house as planned, shushing  
each other vigorously as they snuck Baby Jesus out of the backseat into the middle of the night.  
Where H dropped him.  
It turned out that Baby Jesus wasn't, in fact, made from Venetian marble, but from some kind of  
cheap ceramic that broke with astonishing thoroughness when it came into swift contact with the  
pavement. There had been a hushed, horrified silence as they stood over the bits and pieces.  
"We are so going to hell," Monica had finally said, and it sure hadn't sounded like she was joking.  
Seth hears a sound in his chest and realizes with surprise that it's laughter. He opens his mouth and  
it comes out in a horrible, painful honk, but he can't stop it. He laughs and laughs some more, no  
matter how light-headed it makes him, no matter how he still can't quite stand up from the countertop.  
Yes. Hell. That'd be about right.  
But before he starts to cry again, a feeling that has threatened behind every second of his laughter,  
he realizes he's been hearing another sound this whole time. A creaking and groaning, like a baying  
cow lost somewhere in the house.  
He looks up.  
The groaning is from the pipes. Dirty, rust-colored water is starting to dribble from the kitchen tap.  
Seth practically leaps forward in his desperate rush to drink and drink and drink.


	8. Chapter 8

The water tastes awful, unbelievably so, like metal and mud, but he can't stop himself. He gulps it  
down as it comes, faster through the tap now. After ten or twelve swallows, he feels a churning in his  
stomach, leans back, and throws up all the water he just drank into the sink in great, rust-colored  
cataracts.  
He pants heavily for a minute.  
Then he sees that the water is running a little clearer, though still not exactly drinkable looking. He  
waits for as long as he can bear, letting it clear some more, then he drinks again, more slowly, this  
time taking breaks to breathe and wait.  
He keeps the water down. Feels the coolness of it spreading out from his stomach. It feels good,  
and he notices again how warm it is in this place, but especially in this house. The air is stuffy and  
oppressive, tasting of the dust that covers everything. His arms are filthy with it just from leaning  
against the counter.  
He begins to feel slightly better, slightly stronger. He drinks again, and then again, until the roaring  
thirst is finally satisfied. When he stands up fully this time, he does so without feeling dizzy.  
The sun through the back window is bright and clear. He looks around the kitchen. It's definitely  
his old one, which his mother never stopped complaining about being too small, even after they  
moved to America, where kitchens tended to be big enough to seat a family of elephants around the  
breakfast nook. Then again, in his mother's eyes, everything in England compared unfavorably to  
America, and why shouldn't it?  
After what England had done to them.  
He hasn't thought about it, really thought about it, for years. There was no reason to. Why dwell on  
your worst memory? Not if life had moved on, in a brand-new place, so many new things to learn, so  
many new people to meet.  
And though it had been terrible, his brother had survived, hadn't he? There had been problems, of  
course, as they watched to see how bad any neurological damage might be as he grew, but his brother  
had lived and was usually a charming, functional, happy little kid, despite any difficulties.  
Though there had been that unthinkable period when they all thought the worst, when they all  
looked at Seth and while saying over and over that they didn't blame him, still seemed to think –  
He pushes it out of his mind, swallowing away the ache in his throat. He looks out toward the  
darkened sitting room and wonders what he's supposed to do here.  
Is there a goal? Something to solve?  
Or is he just supposed to stay here forever?  
Is that what hell is? Trapped forever, alone, in your worst memory?  
It makes a kind of sense.  
The bandages don't, though, smudged with dark, dusty stains but stuck fast to his body in an  
arrangement that covers all the wrong parts. And for that matter, the water – now running almost clear  
– doesn't make sense either. Why satisfy his thirst if this is a punishment?  
He still can't hear anything. No machinery, no human voices, no vehicles, nothing. Just the running  
of the water, the sound of which is so comforting, he can't quite bring himself to turn it off.  
He's surprised to feel his stomach rumbling. Emptied twice of all its contents, he realizes that it's  
hungry, and rather than give in to the fear that this causes – because what do you eat in hell? – he  
almost automatically opens the nearest cabinet.  
The shelves are filled with plates and cups, less dusty because shut away, but still with an air of  
abandonment. The cabinet next to it has better glasses and the good china, which he recognizes, most  
but not all of it surviving the shipment to America. He moves quickly on, and in the next cabinet, there  
is finally food. Bags of desiccated pasta, molding boxes of rice that crumble under his touch, a jar of  
sugar that's hardened into a single lump that resists the poking of his fingers. Further searching  
reveals cans of food, some of which are rusted over, others bulging alarmingly, but a few that look  
okay. He takes out one of chicken noodle soup.  
He recognizes the brand. It's one that he and Owen used to be unable to get enough of, used to ask  
their mother to buy over and over again –  
He stops. The memory is a dangerous one. He can feel himself teetering again, an abyss of  
confusion and despair looking right back up at him, threatening to swallow him if he so much as  
glances at it.  
That can be for later, he tells himself. You're hungry. Everything else can wait.  
Even thinking it, he doesn't believe it, but he forces himself to read the can again. "Soup," he says,  
his voice still little more than a croak but better now, after the water. "Soup," he says again, more  
strongly.  
He starts opening drawers. He finds a can opener – rusty and stiff, but usable – in the first one and  
lets out a small "Ha!" of triumph.  
It takes him seventeen tries to get the first cut into the top of the can.  
"Goddammit!" he shouts, though his throat isn't quite up to shouting yet and he has to cough it away.  
But at last there's an opening, one he can work with. His hands are aching from the simple act of  
twisting a can opener, and there's a terrible moment when he thinks he's going to be too weak and  
tired to get any further. But the frustration drives him on and eventually, agonizingly so, there's enough  
of an opening to drink out of.  
He tips the can back into his mouth. The soup has gelatinized and tastes heavily of iron, but it also  
tastes of chicken noodle, a flavor he's suddenly so grateful for that he starts laughing as he's slurping  
down the noodles.  
Then he also senses that he's crying a bit more, too.  
He finishes the can and sets it down with a firm thud.  
Stop this, he thinks. Pull yourself together. What do you need to do here? What's the next thing  
to do? He stands a little straighter. What would Gudmund do?  
And then, for the first time in this place, Seth smiles, small and fleeting, but a smile.  
"Gudmund would have a piss," he croaks.  
Because that is indeed what he needs to do next.


	9. Chapter 9

He turns back toward the dark, dusty sitting room.  
No. Not yet. He can't face that quite yet. Definitely can't face stumbling up the darkened stairs to  
the bathroom at the top of the first landing.  
He turns to the door to the backyard – back garden, he remembers, that's what the English call it,  
what his parents always called it. It takes him a few frustrating minutes to get the lock unstuck, but  
then he steps out into the sunshine again, across the deck his father had built one summer.  
The fences of the neighbors on either side seem amazingly close after all the space his family had  
ended up with in their American house. The lawn itself is now a forest of wheaty-looking stalks and  
weeds nearly as high as Seth's head, even as he stands on the low deck. At the back fence, Seth can  
only just see the top of the old concrete bomb shelter, standing there in its brave arch since World  
War II. His mother had turned it into a potter's shed, which she never used all that much, and it  
quickly became a place to store old bikes and broken furniture.  
The embankment beyond the back fence rises up to a gnarled wall of barbed wire. He can't see any  
farther than that because of how the land angles down behind it.  
But Seth doesn't think this would be hell if the prison weren't still there.  
He averts his eyes and steps to the edge of the deck. He leans forward a bit and waits to pee out  
into the tall grass.  
And waits.  
And waits.  
And grunts with the effort.  
And waits a bit more.  
Until at last, with a heartfelt cry of relief, he sends a poisonously dark yellow stream into the yard.  
And almost immediately calls out in pain. It's like peeing acid, and he looks down at himself in  
distress.  
Then he looks closer.  
There are small cuts, small abrasions and marks all across the skin of his groin and hips. He finds a  
stray piece of white tape tangled in his thickest body hair and a larger one farther down his exposed  
thigh.  
With a wince, he finishes urinating, and starts examining his body more closely in the sunlight.  
There are numerous cuts and scrapes in the crooks of both his arms, and a line of them up the side of  
either buttock. He starts pulling at the bandages around his torso, trying to see underneath them. The  
adhesive is strong, but it finally gives. There's a strange metallic foil on the inside of each bandage,  
and it comes away in a sticky mess, tearing off a few chest hairs he never thought much of anyway.  
The same is true for the bandages on his arms and legs. He works and works at them, leaving behind  
painful bald spots and finding more abrasions and cuts.  
He keeps at it until he completely rids himself of them, coiling them there on the deck, dirty from  
the dust but the metallic bits catching the sunlight and reflecting it back at him sharply, almost  
aggressively. There's no writing on them that he can find, and the metallic part is like nothing he's  
ever seen before in America or England.  
He steps away from them. There is something alien in the way they look. Something wrong.  
Something invasive.  
Seth crosses his arms tightly against himself, and he shudders, though the sun is beating down clear  
and hot. He is completely naked now, and that's the next thing that has to be remedied. He feels  
unbelievably vulnerable like this, more so than the literal fact of it. There is threat here, somewhere,  
he's suddenly sure of it. He glances back to the fence and the prison he knows lies hidden beyond, but  
this place is more wrong than even all that's obvious. There's an unreality under all the dust, all the  
weeds. Ground that seems solid but that might give way any moment.  
He keeps shivering under the heat of the sun, under a clear blue sky without a single airplane in it.  
All at once the energy he spent on eating and drinking catches up with him, exhaustion settling over  
him like a heavy blanket. He feels so weak, so unbelievably, physically weak.  
His arms still crossed, he turns back to his house.  
It sits there, waiting for him, a memory asking to be reentered.


	10. Chapter 10

I'll have to see, Seth tapped onto the screen of his phone. U know how my mum is.  
It's mOm, U homo, Gudmund wrote back. And what's her problem now?  
B in History.  
Ur mom gets upset about GRADES?! What f-ing century does she live in?  
Not this one & only girls text this much, U homo.  
Seth smiled to himself as his phone immediately vibrated with an incoming call. "I said I'd have  
to see," he whispered into it.  
"What's the matter with her?" Gudmund said. "Doesn't she trust me?"  
"Nope."  
"Ah, well, she's smarter than I thought."  
"She's smarter than everyone thinks. That's why she's always so pissed off. Says she's lived  
here eight years and everyone still talks to her in a loud, slow voice, like she's a foreigner."  
"She is a foreigner."  
"She's English. Same language."  
"Not really. Why are you talking so quiet?"  
"They don't know I'm awake yet."  
Seth took a moment to listen from his bed. He could hear his mother stomping around, probably  
trying to find Owen's clarinet. Owen, meanwhile, was in the next bedroom over, playing a  
computer game that involved lots of dramatic guitar solos. And every once in a while there was a  
banging from the kitchen downstairs, where his father was ten months into a three-month DIY  
project. Typical Saturday morning stuff, so, no, thank you, he'd stay here as long as no one  
remembered he –  
"SETH!" he heard shouted from down the hall.  
"Gotta go," he said into the phone.  
"You have to come, Sethy," Gudmund insisted. "How many times do I need to say it? My parents  
are out of town. It's like a commandment to party. And we're not going to get many more chances.  
Senior year, dude, and then we're out of here."  
"I'll do what I can," Seth said hurriedly as his mother's feet came pounding toward his door.  
"I'll call you back." He hung up as she flung the door open. "Jesus," he said, "knock much?"  
"You have no secrets from me," she answered, but with a forced half-smile, and he could tell  
she was trying to apologize, in her bizarrely hostile way.  
"You have no idea what secrets I have," he said.  
"I don't doubt that for a second. Get up. We have to go."  
"Why do I have to come?"  
"Have you seen Owen's clarinet?"  
"He'll be fine for an hour –"  
"Have you seen it?"  
"Are you even listening to me?"  
"Are you listening to me? Where's Owen's goddamn clarinet?"  
"I don't goddamn know! I'm not his goddamn butler!"  
"Watch your mouth," she snapped. "You know he loses track of things. You know he's not as on  
"Watch your mouth," she snapped. "You know he loses track of things. You know he's not as on  
the ball as you. Not since –"  
She didn't finish her sentence. Didn't even trail off, just stopped dead. Seth didn't need to ask  
what she meant.  
"I haven't seen it," he said, "but I still don't see why I have to come and just sit there."  
His mother spoke with angry patience, enunciating every syllable. "Be. Cause. I. Want. To. Go.  
For. A. Run." She dangled the running shoes she was holding. "I get precious little time to myself  
as it is, and you know Owen gets upset if he's left there alone with Miss Baker –"  
"He's fine," Seth said. "He puts it on because he likes the attention."  
His mother sucked in her breath. "Seth –"  
"If I do it, can I stay over at Gudmund's tonight?"  
She paused. His mother didn't like Gudmund much, for reasons she couldn't quite explain  
herself. "I don't even like his name," he'd overheard her saying to his father one night in the next  
room. "What kind of name is Gudmund? He's not Swedish."  
"Gudmund is a Norwegian name, I think," his father had said, not paying much attention.  
"Well, he's not that either. Not even in the way Americans go on about being Irish or Cherokee.  
Honestly, a whole population who refuse to call themselves after their own nation unless they're  
feeling threatened."  
"You must hear them calling themselves American quite a lot then," his father had said dryly,  
and the conversation had soured somewhat after that.  
Seth really didn't understand it. Gudmund was damn near the perfect teen. Popular enough, but  
not too popular; confident, but not too confident; nice to Seth's parents, nice to Owen, and always  
got Seth home by curfew since he'd gotten his car. Like all of Seth's classmates, he was a bit older,  
but only by ten months, seventeen to Seth's sixteen, which was nothing. They ran on the crosscountry  
team together with Monica and H, which couldn't have been more wholesome. And while it  
was true that Gudmund's mother and father were exactly the sort of scary American conservatives  
that tended to horrify Europeans, even Seth's own parents had to admit they were pretty nice  
people one-on-one.  
And though they clearly suspected, his parents had also never found out about any of the trouble  
he and Gudmund got up to. Not that any of it was actually all that bad. No drugs, and though there  
was more than occasional drinking, there was definitely no drunk driving. Gudmund was bright  
and easygoing, and most parents would have been happy to have him around as a friend for their  
son.  
But not, it seemed, Seth's mother. She pretended she had some sixth sense about him.  
And maybe she did.  
"You've got work tomorrow," she said now, but he could already tell she was on her way to a  
yes in the negotiations.  
"Not 'til six," Seth said, keeping his tone as unargumentative as possible.  
His mother considered. "Fine," she said curtly. "Now, get up. We need to go."  
"Close the door," he called after her, but she was already gone.  
He got up and found a shirt to pull on over his head. An hour sitting through Owen's torturous  
clarinet lesson with onion-smelling Miss Baker so his mother could go run furiously along the  
coastal path in exchange for an evening of freedom which included a stash of beer forgotten by  
Gudmund's father (though not behind the wheel of Gudmund's car; really, they were good kids,  
which made her suspicions all the more infuriating; Seth almost wanted to do something bad,  
something really bad, just to show her). But for now, it was a fair enough trade.  
Any chance to get away. Any chance to feel not quite so trapped. Even for a little while.  
He'd take it.  
Five minutes later, he was dressed and in the kitchen. "Hey, Dad," he said, taking down a box  
of cereal.  
"Hey, Seth," his father sighed, intently studying the wooden frame for the new counter, a frame  
that refused to fit, no matter how much sawing went on.  
"Why don't you just hire a guy?" Seth asked, stuffing a handful of peanut-butter-flavored  
granules in his mouth. "Be done in a week."  
"And what guy would that be?" his father asked distractedly. "There's peace to be found in  
doing something for yourself."  
Seth had heard this sentence many, many times. His father taught English at the small, liberal  
arts college that gave Halfmarket two-thirds of its population, and these projects – of which there  
had been more than Seth could count, from the deck at the house in England when he was just a  
baby, adding a utility room in the garage here, to this kitchen extension his father had insisted on  
doing himself – were what he swore kept him sane after swapping London for a small coastal  
American town. The projects all eventually got finished, all eventually pretty well, too, but the  
peace, perhaps, had less to do with the project than with the medication his father took for his  
depression. Heavier than the usual antidepressants that some of his friends took, heavy enough to  
occasionally make his father seem like a ghost in their own house.  
"What have I done wrong now?" his father mumbled, shaking his head in puzzlement at a pile of  
off-cut timber.  
His mother came into the kitchen, thudding Owen's clarinet down on the table. "Would someone  
mind telling me how this ended up in the guest room?"  
"Ever thought of asking Owen?" Seth said through a mouthful of cereal.  
"Asking me what?" Owen said, coming through the door.  
And here was Owen. His little brother. Hair curled up in a ridiculous, sleep-messed pile that  
made him look way younger than his nearly twelve years, a red Kool-Aid stain around his lips and  
crumbs from his breakfast still stuck to his chin, wearing regular jeans but also a Cookie Monster  
pajama top that he was about five years too old and too big for.  
Owen. As scatterbrained and messy as ever.  
But Seth could see his mother's posture change into something that almost resembled joy.  
"Nothing, sweetheart," she said. "Go wash your face and put on a clean shirt. We're almost  
ready to go."  
Owen beamed back at her. "I got to level 82!"  
"That's brilliant, darling. Now, hurry along. We're going to be late."  
"Okay!" Owen said, blazing a smile at Seth and his father as he left the kitchen. Seth's mother's  
gaze greedily followed him out the doorway, as if it was all she could do not to eat him.  
When she turned back into the kitchen, her face was disconcertingly open and warm until she  
caught Seth and his father staring at her. There was an awkward moment where no one said  
anything, and she at least had the good grace to look a little embarrassed.  
"Hurry up, Seth," she said. "We really are going to be late."  
"Hurry up, Seth," she said. "We really are going to be late."  
She left. Seth just stood there with his handful of cereal, until his father, without a word, started  
sawing slowly on the counter frame again. The familiar yearning to get away rose in Seth's chest  
like a physical pressure, so strong he thought he might be able to see it if he looked.  
One more year, he thought. One year to go.  
His final year of high school lay ahead of him, and then he would go off to college, (maybe,  
hopefully) the same one as Gudmund and possibly Monica. The location didn't matter so much as  
long as it was as far as possible from this damp little corner of southwest Washington State.  
Far away from these strangers who called themselves his parents.  
But then he remembered there were smaller escapes closer to home.  
An hour of clarinet, he thought. And the weekend's mine.  
He thought it more angrily than he expected.  
And at the same time, he realized he wasn't very hungry anymore.


	11. Chapter 11

Seth wakes up on the larger of the two red settees, and once more, it takes him a moment to re-emerge  
from the –  
It really can't have just been a dream.  
He'd been asleep this time, he knew, but like the last one, it had been far too vivid, far too clear.  
None of the shifting vagueness of a dream, none of the changes in scene or inabilities to move or  
speak properly or lapses in time or logic.  
He had been there. Right there. Again. Living it.  
He remembers that morning, as clearly as if he'd just watched it on television. It had been summer,  
months before the Baby Jesus incident, just after he'd gotten his first part-time job waiting tables at  
the local steakhouse. Gudmund's parents had flown to California for business, leaving Gudmund to  
watch over a house that looked out onto Washington's cold, tumultuous ocean. H and Monica had  
come over for a while, too, and they'd all done nothing, really, except drink some of Gudmund's  
father's forgotten beer and shoot the shit and laugh themselves incoherent at the dumbest things you  
could think of.  
It had been amazing. Just utterly, utterly amazing, like that whole summer before senior year had  
been, when everything had seemed possible, when everything good felt like it was just within reach  
for once, when if he could just hang in there, it really would finally all come together –  
Seth feels his chest tighten with a sadness that threatens to rush in like the waves that drowned him.  
It had been amazing.  
But it was gone.  
And was gone even before he died.  
He sits up, putting his feet on the dusty hardwood floor of his childhood home. He scratches his  
fingers through his hair and is surprised to find how short it is, almost military short, way shorter than  
he'd ever had it in real life. He stands and brushes away the dust from the big mirror hanging over the  
settee.  
He's shocked by what he sees. He looks like a war refugee. Hair buzzed down to almost nothing,  
his face alarmingly thin, his eyes looking like he's never slept in a safe place in his life.  
This just gets better and better, he thinks.  
He had come back into the house after peeling the bandages from his skin. By that point, the  
exhaustion was overwhelming, settling on him like a heavy anesthetic. It had been all he could do to  
get to the larger settee, shake the dust off the blanket draped along the back, pull it over himself, and  
fall into a sleep that felt more like being knocked out.  
And he had dreamed. Or relived. Or whatever.  
It tugs again at his chest as he stands there, so he wraps the blanket around himself like a beach  
towel and goes into the kitchen again, with a vague thought of trying to scrounge dinner. It takes him a  
moment to notice that the light from the back window has changed.  
The sun is rising. Again. It's another dawn outside.  
He's slept through almost an entire day and night. Then he wonders again about how time might  
pass here in hell.  
If it did at all. If this just wasn't the same day all over again.  
After an easier time with the can opener – he's feeling a little stronger for the rest – he opens a can  
of beans. They taste unspeakable, and he spits them out. He checks the cabinet for more soup.  
There isn't any. In fact, there isn't much of anything, unless he starts eating mummified pasta. Not  
feeling very hopeful, he turns the knobs on the stovetop to see if he might be able to boil some water,  
but no gas comes through the elements, and there's no electricity either when he tries to power up the  
dusty old microwave. None of the overhead lights come on when he flicks the switches, and the  
refrigerator has a faint smell even with the door tightly shut, so he doesn't risk opening it.  
For lack of anything else, he drinks from the taps again. Then he makes an annoyed grunt and gets a  
glass from the cabinet. He fills it with water that looks almost clear now and drinks it down.  
Okay, then, he thinks, trying to keep the fear from rising again. What's next? What's next, what's  
next, what's next?  
Clothes. Clothes are next. Yes.  
He still can't face going upstairs – he doesn't want to see his old bedroom just yet, not the one he  
shared with Owen, not in this house – but he goes back to the main room, remembering a cubbyhole  
under the staircase. Behind the dining table, two small swing doors in the wall lead to a lifeless  
washer and dryer, silent as sleeping cattle in their stalls. He lets out a cry of delight when he finds a  
pair of gray sweatpants in the dryer. They're baggy but they fit. There are no shirts to be found, and  
nothing at all in the washing machine except a smell of ancient mildew, but he finds a sports jacket  
hanging on a hook. It's tight around his back and the sleeves barely reach past his elbows, but it  
covers him. He scrounges around on the dark shelves built into the cubby and finds one well-worn  
black dress shoe and one giant tennis shoe that don't come close to matching but are at least for  
opposite feet and big enough to wear.  
He goes to the mirror in the main room. He looks like a homeless clown, but he's no longer naked.  
All right, he thinks. Next thing.  
Almost exactly at that thought, his stomach rumbles unpleasantly, and not with hunger. He finds  
himself rushing out back again to a corner of the tall grass for some far more disgusting bodily  
functions. He cramps painfully, more than what would come from chicken noodle soup and a mouthful  
of spoiled beans. It's a huge gnawing hunger, so big it's making him sick.  
Waiting out the stomach cramps is bad enough, but he feels increasingly uneasy out here in the  
back, with the pile of bandages still coiled on the deck, the unreasonably tall grass, the barbed wire  
fencing up on the embankment.  
The prison beyond.  
As soon as he's able, he gets back inside and manages a halfway-decent wash with some solidified  
dishwashing liquid and cold water from the tap. There's nothing to dry himself with, so he just waits,  
wondering what to do now.  
Here he is. In a dusty old house with no food left in it. With clothes that are a joke. Drinking water  
that's probably poisoning him.  
He doesn't want to be outside, but he can't stay stuck in here either.  
What's he supposed to do?  
If only there was someone here to help him. Someone whose opinion he could ask. Someone he  
could share this weird burden with.  
But there isn't. There's only him.  
But there isn't. There's only him.  
And he can see the empty kitchen cupboards.  
He can't stay here, not without food, not in these inadequate clothes.  
He looks up at the ceiling, thinking for a moment that he could explore the rooms above.  
But no. Not that. Not yet.  
He stands there, silently, for a long, long while, as the rising sun farther fills the kitchen.  
"Okay," he finally says to himself. "Let's go see what hell looks like."


	12. Chapter 12

As he pulls open the front door, he notices that the switch that keeps it from locking is flipped. He's  
been in the house all night with an unlocked door. Even though there's no sign of anyone else here,  
this worries him. He can't let it lock when he leaves, though, or he'll never be able to get back inside.  
He steps out into the low sunshine, pulling it closed behind him, hoping it at least looks locked.  
The street is the same as yesterday. Or whenever that was, probably yesterday. He waits and  
watches. Absolutely nothing changes, so he walks down the steps, down the path where he – Where  
he what? Woke up? Was reborn? Died? He hurries past the spot and reaches the small gate to the  
sidewalk. He stops there.  
It's still quiet. Still empty. Still a place stopped in time.  
He tries to remember more of the neighborhood. To his right is the train station, where there was  
nothing much more than the station building itself. But to his left is the way to the High Street, where  
there used to be a supermarket. There had been clothes shops there, too, he thinks. Nothing fancy, but  
better than what he's wearing.  
Left it is, then.  
Left.  
He doesn't move. Neither does the world.  
It's either go left or stay inside and starve, he thinks.  
For a moment, the second choice seems the more tempting.  
"Screw it," he says. "You're already dead. What's the worst that can happen?"  
He goes left.  
He hunches his shoulders as he walks, shoving his hands into the pockets of the jacket, even though  
they're uncomfortably high. Whose jacket was this? He doesn't think he saw his dad ever wear one  
like this, but then again, who remembers clothes when you're that young?  
He looks around furtively as he walks, turning often to make sure nothing's following him. He  
reaches the street leading up into town. Aside from the huge sinkhole across the middle of it – ablaze  
with a weed forest of its own – it's the same as everywhere else. Cars on deflated tires, covered in  
dust, houses with paint peeling off, and no signs of life anywhere.  
He stops at the edge of the sinkhole. It looks like a water pipe ruptured somewhere and the ground  
opened up like you saw sometimes on the news, usually with journalists in helicopters hovering over,  
saying nothing much for very long spaces of time.  
There are no cars down in it and none stopped along the edge either, so it must have happened long  
after the traffic ceased.  
Unless the traffic never started, he thinks. Unless this place didn't exist until I –  
"Stop it," he says. "Just stop it."  
He has a fleeting, almost casual thought, about how there is so much plant life in this place, all  
these weeds and ridiculous grasses, all growing completely out of control and unchecked, like down  
here in this really quite huge hole.  
So you'd think there'd be –  
And before he can even think the word animals, he sees the fox.  
And before he can even think the word animals, he sees the fox.  
It's frozen there, down at the bottom, tucked in amongst the weeds, its eyes bright and surprised in the  
morning sun.  
A fox.  
A real, live, living fox.  
It blinks at him, alert, but not quite afraid, not yet.  
"What the hell?" Seth whispers.  
There's a small bark, and three baby foxes – pups? No, kits, he remembers – climb playfully over  
their mother, before freezing, too, when they see Seth standing there above them.  
They wait and watch, looking ready to run, ready to respond to whatever Seth does next. Seth  
wonders what he'll do next, too. Wonders also at the reddish brown faces and the bright staring eyes  
of the creatures. Wonders what they mean.  
It's a long time before he moves away from the sinkhole, but the fox and her kits never stop staring  
at him, even as he heads back up the street.  
Foxes, he thinks. Actual foxes.  
At the very moment he thought about them.  
Almost as if he'd called them into being himself.  
He hurries up toward the High Street now, his head still down, eyes glancing around even more  
suspiciously. Every moment, he expects something to come jumping out of the bushes, out of the  
unkempt lawns or weedy cracks in the pavement.  
But nothing does.  
He feels himself tiring again, quickly, too quickly, and when he reaches the High Street, he almost  
collapses on a nearby bench, panting from the effort of walking up a short hill.  
It makes him angry. He spent three years on the cross-country team at Boswell High, the hobby and  
habit of running having been picked up from his mother, something that should have brought them  
closer together but had somehow not. Granted, he wasn't a particularly serious competitor, Boswell  
regularly got beaten quite badly, but still. There's no way he should be out of breath walking up one  
stupid road.  
He looks around. The High Street is really just a long, skinny town square, blocked off at each end  
by metal posts. His mother would shop here with him and Owen when every square inch was covered  
in stalls selling sugared almonds and popcorn; homemade candles and bracelets that were meant to  
cure arthritis; ethnic clocks and paintings even toddler Owen thought were ugly.  
There's nothing here now. It's a vast, empty space, with the now-familiar proliferation of weeds  
and abandoned-looking buildings lining either side, just like any other street.  
Seth waits a moment before getting up from the bench.  
He didn't create the fox. He didn't. It was just hidden there in the weeds, and he saw it, that was  
all. He's thought of plenty of things since he's been here, his parents and Owen, Gudmund and H and  
Monica, even his uncle when he saw the painting over the hearth, and none of them had suddenly  
appeared.  
There were wild plants, and this seemed for all intents and purposes to be England, so why  
wouldn't there be foxes? Foxes were English. He remembers seeing them when he lived here, sloping  
across the street with their oddly adult air of detachment. So of course, there'd be foxes. Why not?  
But foxes had to eat. Seth's eyes pore over the trees that grow from brick boxes up the High Street,  
looking for birds, maybe, or squirrels or rats. They must be there. If one fox was here, there had to be  
more animals, more something.  
Didn't there? If he just didn't actually create –  
"Hey," he says, stopping this line of thought but feeling unsatisfied.  
"Hey," he says again, not sure why he's saying it, wanting to say it once more.  
And louder this time.  
"Hey!" he says, standing up.  
"HEY!"  
He shouts it again and again, his fists clenched, his throat raking from the effort. He keeps  
screaming until he's hoarse, until his voice actually breaks.  
It's only then that he realizes his face is wet from more crying.  
"Hey," he says, whispering it now.  
No one answers.  
Not a bird or a squirrel or the fox or her kits.  
No one answers from any quarter.  
He's alone.  
He swallows against the pain in his throat and goes to see what he can find.


	13. Chapter 13

The supermarket at the end of the High Street is deeper and darker than the rest of the stores, but  
through the glass frontage, Seth thinks he can still see shelves filled with something. He shifts the  
pack on his back and realizes, stupidly, that he's overloaded it with clothes and other supplies. No  
place to put any groceries. He sets it down and starts to take stuff out that he can come back for, but  
then something against a wall catches his eye.  
That'll do.  
It takes him nearly fifteen minutes to get a rusty shopping cart separated from the petrified row of  
them, but eventually it comes, its wheels even mostly turning if he forces them hard enough.  
It's easier to throw a brick the second time, though once inside, the store is much darker than he  
thought. The ceiling is low, and the aisles block any view of what they might be hiding in their depths.  
He thinks of the bats again. And what if there was something larger in there than a fox? Did England  
have big predators? There were mountain lions and bears in the forests back home, but he couldn't  
remember a single dangerous thing anyone ever mentioned as living in England.  
He listens to the silence.  
Nothing. Nothing at all beyond his breathing. No hum of electricity, no sound of things rustling.  
Though, he supposes, the smashing of the doors could have silenced anything in here.  
He waits. But still there's nothing.  
He starts to push the unforgiving cart down the aisles.  
The produce section is completely empty. The bays yawn open, with only a few shriveled husks of  
unidentifiable fruits and vegetables at the bottom, and as he goes from aisle to aisle, his hopes start to  
sink a little. The shelves do have stuff on them, but they've gone much the way of the things in the  
kitchen cabinets. Dusty old boxes that crumble upon touch, jars of once-red tomato sauce now  
blackened within, a section of egg cartons that have clearly been ripped apart by a hungry beast.  
But he turns a corner and there's good news. Batteries, lots of them. Many are corroded but some  
are okay. It only takes a few tries before his big flashlight is working.  
Torch, he thinks, shining it down a long dark aisle, seeing piles of flour scattered across the floor.  
The English call this a torch.  
He balances the torch on the shopping cart and picks his way through the rest of the supermarket,  
finding some bottled water but not much else. Eventually, he realizes there's going to be nothing much  
of use anywhere – not the loaves of bread shrunk to nothing inside their wrappers, not the unplugged  
freezer chests filled with a black mold that smells like rancid olives, not the packages of cookies and  
crackers that are so much dust – nothing except the two aisles with most of the cans.  
Again, many of them are rusted beyond use or so bulging with bacteria that Seth can practically  
hear it growing inside, but moving the torch up and down the shelves, he finds plenty that look normal,  
if dusty. He fills his cart with soups and pastas, with corn and peas, with even, he's delighted to find,  
custard. There are so many cans, in fact, he'd have to make several trips here to even make a dent in  
them.  
So, enough to feed him. For a while.  
For however long he might be here.  
The darkness and silence of the supermarket, even with the comfortably heavy torch in his hand,  
suddenly feels like too much. Too oppressive, too heavy.  
"Quit it," he tells himself. "You'll go crazy if you think like this."  
But he puts his weight behind the cart and gets himself back out into the daylight.  
He's tiring again, he can feel it, and the hunger is a real thing now, almost as bad as yesterday's thirst.  
He spies some green up around a corner from the market and remembers the little park there, sliding  
down a hill into a small valley with fountains and paths.  
He pushes the cart, grunting at the effort, until he's at the top of the park. It's grown up like a jungle,  
unsurprisingly, but the basic shape is still there. There's even a little sandbox area nearby. It's about  
the only place here free of weeds.  
"This'll do," he says, and lets his backpack fall to his feet.  
He follows the directions on the camp stove, and five minutes later, there's enough butane left in  
the small canister to heat up a can of spaghetti he opened with a far-less-rusty can opener he also took  
from the store. It's only when the spaghetti is boiling that he realizes he didn't take any knives or  
forks. He clicks off the stove and has no choice but to wait for it to cool.  
He takes a bottle of water from the cart and holds it up to the sun. It looks clear, clearer than the  
water from his tap anyway, but even though the seal is unbroken, the water is still half-evaporated  
away. He cracks it open, the bottle giving a little hiss as he does so. It smells all right, so he takes a  
drink and looks down at the park below him.  
It's familiar, yes, despite the wildness, but what does familiar mean? he wonders. This place looks  
like a version of his childhood home stuck in time, but that doesn't mean it's actually the same place.  
It feels real enough. Certainly to the touch, and definitely to the nose. But it's also a world that only  
seems to have him in it, so how real can it be? If this is just a dusty old memory that he's trapped in,  
maybe it isn't really even a place at all, maybe it's just what happens when your final dying seconds  
turn into an eternity. The place of the worst season of your life, frozen forever, decaying without ever  
really dying.  
He takes another sip of water. Whatever this place might be, they'd never come all that much to the  
real version of the park. Sandbox and small play area aside, the steepness of the hill prevented it from  
being much fun. A big brick wall across the bottom of the main incline made even skateboarders  
avoid the challenge, so it must have been more a place for High Street workers to take a smoke break.  
But there is the pond still, at the bottom, kidney-shaped but surprisingly clear-looking. He would  
have expected a film of algae across the top, but it actually looks cool and inviting on a hot summer  
day. There's a rock in the middle that was usually covered with ducks preening themselves. There  
aren't any today, but the sun is so bright, the day so clear and warm, that it somehow seems like ducks  
might swoop in at any moment.  
He looks up, half thinking that his thoughts might create them. They don't.  
He's hot in his over-warm hiking clothes, and the pond looks so inviting that he has a fleeting  
impulse to jump in, have a refreshing swim, have something even like a bath and just allow himself to  
float, suspended in water –  
He stops.  
Suspended in water, he thinks.  
The terror of it, the sheer awful terror that never seemed to stop. Fear was bearable when you could  
see an end to it, but there was no end in sight out in those freezing waves, those pitiless fists of ocean  
that cared nothing for you, that tipped you over and down in a kind of callous blindness, filling your  
lungs, smashing you against rocks –  
He reaches around to where his shoulder blade snapped. He can remember the pain of it, can  
remember the irrevocable snap of the bone breaking. He feels a little sick at the thought, even though  
his shoulder here, in this place, works fine.  
Then he wonders where his body is.  
In whatever world this isn't, out there where he died, where is he? He wonders if he's washed  
ashore yet. He wonders if they even know to look for him in the ocean or on the beach, because he  
wasn't supposed to be there, no one was supposed to be there at that time of year. Freezing winter on  
an angry, rocky coast? Why would anyone be near the water, much less in it?  
Not unless they were forced.  
Not unless someone forced them.  
He feels another pain in his stomach, an unease at the memory of his last moments on the beach that  
makes him feel even sicker. He screws the cap back on the water bottle and forces himself to return to  
the spaghetti, now cooled enough to eat. He makes a mess of it, tipping it into his mouth and slopping  
it onto one of his new T-shirts, not caring much.  
He wonders how his parents found out. Would he have been gone long enough to be missed before  
his body was found? Would they have been surprised by policemen showing up at the door, carrying  
their hats under their arms and asking to come in? Or would they have been worried by his absence,  
growing more worried by the hour, until it became clear something had gone wrong?  
Or if time worked the same here as it did there – though the warm summer here and the freezing  
winter there put that into question, and he had no idea how long that first purgatorial bit on the path  
had lasted, but still – he might have only died late the day before yesterday or even early yesterday  
morning. It's possible they haven't even noticed yet. His parents might think he's at a friend's house  
for the weekend, and between Owen's clarinet lessons and his mum's running and his father's  
decision to start redoing the bathroom, they might still be unaware that he's gone at all.  
They never had noticed him all that much. Not after what happened.  
In fact, maybe, secretly, they'd have some guilty happiness that it wasn't Owen who had drowned.  
Maybe they'd be a little relieved that Seth was no longer a walking reminder of that summer before  
they moved. Maybe –  
Seth sets down the empty can of spaghetti and wipes his mouth with his sleeve.  
Then he wipes his eyes with his other sleeve.  
But, he thinks, it's possible to die before you die.  
There's no one walking through the park, no one in this world at all who can see him sitting on the  
edge of the sandbox, but he lowers his face down to his knees, as he can't help but weep once more.


	14. Chapter 14

"I mean, for God's sake, just look at them," Monica said as they lay on a hill out of the sight line  
of their cross-country coach, watching the cheerleaders practice on the football field. "How can  
anyone's boobs be that perky without surgery?"  
"It's the autumn chill in the air," H said, ironically quoting something Mr. Edson, their English  
teacher, had said that morning. "Makes everything firm up."  
Monica slapped him upside the head.  
"Ow!" H protested. "What'd you do that for? You're the one who said to look at them!"  
"I didn't mean you."  
It was the second week of their senior year, early September. By mutual agreement, they'd taken  
a well-known shortcut on their running route, hiding in almost plain sight near the practice finish  
line, and giving themselves twenty minutes before they were expected back. Remarkably for this  
time of year, the sun was shining in a clear blue sky, though the wind coming in off the ocean gave  
the air an extra snap.  
Days like this you could almost call beautiful, Seth thought.  
"The chill firms them up?" Gudmund asked H, stretching back on the grass incline. "Is that why  
you have a permanent boner all autumn?"  
"All year more like it," Monica mumbled.  
"As long as you kids stay safe," Gudmund said.  
Monica gave him a look. "Like I'm going to have his baby."  
"Hey!" H said. "That's not nice."  
"There they go again," Seth said.  
They all looked back over the field, and sure enough, Boswell High's own blonde and brunette  
terrors were back at it. Though that wasn't fair, Seth thought. Most of them were actually pretty  
nice. They all watched, though, as Chiara Leithauser, one of the less nice ones, left the pack and  
started walking back toward the main school building.  
"Where's she going?" Gudmund said.  
"Forgot to give Principal Marshall his after-school hand job," H sniggered.  
"Oh, please," Monica said. "Chiara's serious about that chastity shit. Won't even let Blake  
Woodrow put his hands on her bra."  
Gudmund shrugged. "Good for her."  
Monica laughed, but when he didn't reply, she scanned his face closely. "You mean that, don't  
you?"  
Gudmund shrugged again. "At least she's got principles. What's wrong with that? Somebody's  
got to counterbalance all us amoral types."  
"That's what we can tell Coach Goodall when he catches us," Seth said as they caught sight of  
the cross-country coach across the field, looking annoyed at his watch, wondering why his senior  
runners were quite so overdue from their first long training run.  
"There's nothing wrong with anyone having principles," Monica said. "But there is something  
wrong with using them to beat four kinds of crap out of everybody else."  
"They're only her opinions," Gudmund said. "You don't have to listen to them."  
Monica's mouth opened to reply, and then it dropped open farther in amused astonishment.  
Monica's mouth opened to reply, and then it dropped open farther in amused astonishment.  
"You like her."  
Gudmund put on an ostentatiously innocent face.  
"You do!" Monica nearly shouted. "Jesus, Gudmund, that's like loving a concentration-camp  
guard!"  
"I'm not saying I like her, don't be stupid," Gudmund said. "I'm just saying I could get her."  
Seth looked over at him.  
"Get her?" H asked. "You mean like –" and he made a thrusting motion with his hips that  
caused a horrified silence. "What?" he said as they all stared at him.  
Monica shook her head. "Not in a million years. It's like she's got a limited lifetime supply of  
fun, and she isn't going to waste any of it on high school."  
"Those are the easiest ones to get," Gudmund said. "All their morals are balanced way up high.  
One push knocks 'em right over."  
Monica shook her head again, smiling at him, like she always did. "The shit you talk."  
"You know what we should do?" H said, suddenly enthusiastic. "We should have like a bet,  
right? Where Gudmund has to sleep with Chiara Leithauser by like, spring break or something?  
'Cause you could totally do it, bro. Show her where the wild things are."  
"From someone who can't even find a map to the wild things," Monica said.  
"Hey!" H said to her, his voice low and aggrieved. "What did I say about telling them our  
business?"  
Monica huffed and turned her back.  
"What do you think, Sethy?" Gudmund said, trying to steer the moment away from an argument.  
"Think I should take that bet? Go for Chiara Leithauser?"  
"What," Seth said, "and then secretly find out she's got a heart of gold and actually fall in love  
with her and then she dumps you when she finds out about the bet but you prove yourself to her by  
standing outside her house in the rain playing her your special song and on prom night you share  
a dance that reminds not just the school but the entire wounded world what love really means?"  
He stopped because they were all looking at him.  
"Damn, Seth," Monica said admiringly. "'The entire wounded world.' I'm putting that in my  
next paper for Edson."  
Seth crossed his arms. "I'm just saying a bet over Gudmund having sex with Chiara Leithauser  
sounds like some piece of shit teenage movie none of us would watch in a million years."  
"Truer words, never spoken," Gudmund said, standing up from the grass. "She doesn't deserve  
me, anyway."  
"You're right," Monica said. "Dating the best-looking, richest, and most popular guy in school  
must be punishment enough."  
H made a scoffing sound. "Blake Woodrow isn't that good-looking."  
They all stared at him again. "I am so sick of you guys doing that!" he said. "Not everything I  
say is stupid. Blake Woodrow has a girl's haircut and the forehead of a caveman."  
There was another pause before Monica nodded. "Yeah, okay, I'll give you that."  
"And Gudmund could totally get her if he wanted," H said, getting up to join the rest of them.  
"Thanks, man," Gudmund said. "From you that's almost a compliment."  
"But you're not even going to try?" H said hopefully.  
Monica hit him again. "That's enough. I may hate her, but she's not a prostitute. Quit talking  
Monica hit him again. "That's enough. I may hate her, but she's not a prostitute. Quit talking  
about her like she's someone you can just take off a shelf." She looked at Gudmund. "Even you."  
"I wasn't serious, you feminist," Gudmund said, smiling. "I only said it was possible. If I  
wanted to."  
Monica stuck her tongue out at him before setting off across the field and onto the track, H on  
her heels, both of them trying to look as if they'd been running for the past half hour.  
Gudmund glanced at Seth, who was watching him seriously. "You don't think I could?"  
"Monica would be so jealous she'd probably choke to death," Seth said as they started running  
back across the field, too.  
Gudmund shook his head. "Nah, Monica and I are like brother and sister."  
"You flirt that much with your sister? She wants you so bad, it's like she's got a permanent  
toothache."  
"Jeez, are you sure she's the jealous one, Sethy?" Gudmund punched Seth playfully on the  
shoulder. "Homo," he said.  
But he said it with a grin.  
They ran toward the now-shouting Coach Goodall and –


	15. Chapter 15

Seth snaps his head up.  
The world is still the same. The sun still in the same place. The park still wild beneath him. It  
doesn't even feel like he dozed off.  
He groans. Are they going to come every time he closes his eyes? All the things that are most  
painful in their different ways, whether because they're too bad or because they're too good?  
Hell, he reminds himself. This is hell. Why wouldn't it suck?  
He gathers his stuff and pushes the cart back toward the High Street, beginning to feel tired again.  
"This is stupid," he says, sweating profusely under the insulated clothes, the backpack on his  
shoulders, and the weight of the cans in the cart. He stops by the doors of the supermarket, swaps the  
spaghetti-stained T-shirt for a fresh one, then unloads half the cans onto the ground to come back for  
later.  
He wipes the sweat from his brow and takes another drink of water. Nothing has moved down the  
High Street. The glass from where he broke into the outdoor store is still lying there, glinting in the  
sun. The bats have flown off to who knows where. It's all just weeds and silence.  
Lots and lots and lots of silence.  
He feels it again. A strangeness. A threat. Something not right with this place beyond all that's so  
obviously wrong.  
He thinks again about the prison. It sits out there, unseen, like it's waiting for him. A huge, heavy  
thing, almost like it has a gravity all its own, almost like it's pulling at him to –  
Maybe he'll take the food back to the house now.  
Yeah, maybe that's what he'll do.  
He grows more and more tired as he pushes the cart back down the main road, unreasonably so, like  
he's getting over being really sick. By the time he makes it to the sinkhole – the fox and her kits long  
gone – he feels like he's run a marathon and has to stop and take in more water.  
He turns down his own street. The cart grows heavier as he approaches his front path, and as much  
as he doesn't feel like he should just leave it on the sidewalk, he's too tired to bring it all in just now.  
He takes his backpack, the torch, and a couple cans of food and heads into the house.  
The door swings open again under his touch, and he holds up the torch, halfheartedly ready to  
swing it should he meet anyone who needs clobbering. The hallway is still shadowy, and the light  
from the torch guides his way in. As he heads down the hall, he thinks he might just heat up some  
custard next, if it's still good in these cans. He hasn't had custard since –  
He freezes.  
The torch has caught the stairs. It's the first time he's properly looked at them, the first time a  
proper light has been on them, and he sees –  
Footprints.  
In the dust coming down the stairs.  
He's not alone. There's somebody else here.  
He backs up so quickly his new pack catches the door, shutting it behind him, and for a moment he  
panics at being trapped inside with whoever it is. He scrambles around and gets the door open,  
running back down the front steps, dropping the cans of custard, looking behind him to ward off  
whoever might be there –  
He stops by the shopping cart, panting heavily, holding the torch out like a club, shaking with  
adrenaline, ready to fight.  
But there's no one.  
No one comes running out after him. No one attacks him. No sound at all from inside the house.  
"Hey!" he calls. "I know you're in there!" He grips the torch even tighter. "Who's there? Who is  
it?"  
And again, nothing.  
Well, of course, there's nothing. Because even if there was someone, why would they identify  
themselves?  
Seth looks up and down the street, heart pounding, wondering what to do. All the terraced houses,  
with their doors shut and their curtains pulled. Maybe every house was hiding someone. Maybe this  
place wasn't empty after all. Maybe they were just waiting for him to –  
He stops. Waiting for him to what?  
This road, these houses. You couldn't have a world with people in it and have this much stuff  
undisturbed. You just couldn't. There were no other tracks in the dirt, no plants broken, no paths  
cleared. People had to go out, and if they didn't, they had to have stuff brought to them.  
And nobody but Seth has come down this street for a very long time.  
He looks back at his front door, still open from where he fled.  
He waits. And waits.  
Nothing changes. No sounds, no movement, not even any animals. Just the bright-blue sky and  
plenty of sunshine to make a mockery of his fear. Eventually, he starts to calm down. All that was true  
is still true. Even in his day or two (or whatever) here, he's seen nothing, not one thing to indicate  
anyone else.  
Not yet, anyway.  
But still he waits.  
Until finally, the adrenaline starts to fade and his exhaustion returns. He has to lie down, that's all  
there is to it. He has to eat, as well. He has to get over this weakness that's making everything here so  
hard.  
And the final truth of it is, where else is he going to go?  
Keeping the torch in front of him, he walks slowly down the path, up the steps, and to the doorway.  
He stops there, shining the light down to the staircase. Now that he's looking, he can see the footprints  
pretty clearly, coming down from the very top step, some places with a clear print, some with the dust  
smeared like the person was stumbling down the stairs.  
Down, but not back up. They're only facing one direction.  
"Hello?" he calls again, more tentatively this time.  
He edges inside, toward the doorway to the main room. Heart thumping loudly, he turns the corner,  
ready to club someone with the torch.  
But there's no one there. Nothing's been disturbed, other than where he disturbed it, in either the  
living or dining areas, nothing moved in the cubbyhole, everything in the kitchen just as he left it. He  
even looks out the back, but it's the same, too, the metallic-sided bandages still lying in their heap,  
unmoved.  
So the footprints could have been there for who knows how long, he thinks, relaxing a little. They  
could have been there since before he –  
He stops.  
Stumbling down the stairs, he thinks, the words suddenly making a kind of sense.  
He goes back and stands over the bottom step. He's looking at prints of feet, bare feet, not shoes.  
He kicks off a sneaker and peels off his new sock. He places his foot by the lowest, dusty footprint.  
They match. Exactly.  
He looks, for the first time, up the staircase. There's been something about the thought of going up  
there that's made him wary ever since he first arrived. That cramped attic bedroom he shared with  
Owen when they were small. Those nights he spent there, alone, wondering if they were ever going to  
get Owen back, and then wondering if he'd live when they did.  
But he's already been up there, it seems.  
He woke up on the path outside, and the reason was obviously because he'd stumbled down the  
stairs, in those horrible, confused moments after he died. He'd come down the hallway, out into  
sunlight, and collapsed onto the path.  
Where he woke up.  
But clearly not for the first time.  
He shines the torch up the stairwell but doesn't see much past the bathroom door at the top of the  
landing, shut tight. The bathroom is over the kitchen, and the landing turns from it, to the office and his  
parents' bedroom over his head and the attic another floor up.  
What was he doing up there?  
And why had he run from it?  
He shucks off the backpack, dropping it to the floor, then he places his foot on the bottom step,  
avoiding his footprint. He takes the step up. And then another. Holding the torch in front of him, he  
reaches the bathroom door. There's a sliver of light underneath it, so he opens it, shedding sunlight on  
the landing from the bathroom window.  
The bathroom floor is the same terrible burgundy linoleum that his mother always hated but his  
father had never gotten around to replacing. There are no footsteps across the dust of it, nothing's  
been disturbed here. He leaves the door open for light and turns back to the landing. Across which his  
bare, smeared footprints are walking toward him.  
He takes care, without knowing precisely why, to avoid stepping in them as he crosses the landing.  
The office is first on his right, and he looks inside. It's exactly how he remembers it, down to the  
ancient filing cabinet his mother refused to allow to be shipped to America and a hilariously bulky  
old-fashioned computer. He flicks the light switch without much hope or success, but like the  
bathroom, nothing in the office has been disturbed.  
There are no footprints coming from his parents' bedroom either, but Seth opens the door anyway.  
Inside, the bed is made, the floor is clear, the closet doors are shut tight. Seth goes to the curtains and  
looks down on the front walk. The shopping cart is still out there, unmoved, unbothered.  
He heads back out to the landing and confirms what he suspected all along. His footsteps come  
down from the upper floor, from the attic where his bedroom was.  
And they don't go back up.  
And they don't go back up.  
However this started, it started up there.  
He shines the torch up the second flight of stairs. There's only a small landing up top as the house  
narrows to the peak of its roof. The door to the attic bedroom is there.  
It's open.  
Seth can see a dim light coming through it, no doubt from the skylight that served as the bedroom's  
only window.  
"Hello?" he says.  
He starts up the second flight, torch still out in front of him. He can feel himself breathing harder.  
He keeps his eyes on the door as he climbs, stopping on the last step. The sweat on his palms is  
making the torch slippery in his hands.  
Dammit, he thinks. What am I so afraid of?  
He takes another deep breath, raises the torch until it's practically over his head, and leaps through  
the doorway and into his old bedroom, ready to fight, ready to be fought –  
But there's no one there. Again.  
It's just his old bedroom.  
With one big difference.  
There's a coffin sitting in the middle of the floor.  
And it's open.


	16. Chapter 16

Everything else is the same.  
The crescent-moon wallpaper is still on the walls, the water stain still spreading through it under  
the skylight in the sloped ceiling. He thinks he can even see the face patterned there that he always  
used to scare Owen with, telling him that if he didn't fall asleep in the next one minute, the face  
would eat him alive.  
Their beds are there, too, unbelievably small against two corners, Owen's little more than a cot,  
really. There's the shelf with all their books, very roughly used but still favorites. Below it is their  
box of toys, piled with plastic action figures and cars and ray guns that shot out little more than  
loudness, and on Owen's bed is a whole array of stuffed toys – elephants, mostly, they were his  
favorite – every single one of which Seth knows is across the ocean in his brother's bedroom.  
And taking up the middle of the room, on the floor in the space between the beds, sits the long black  
coffin, the lid opened like a giant clam.  
The blind is down over the skylight, making the light vague in here, but Seth doesn't want to step past  
the coffin to raise it.  
It takes him a moment to remember that the torch has other uses than as a weapon. He shines it on  
the coffin. He tries to remember if he's ever actually seen one in real life. He's never been to a  
funeral, not even in ninth grade when Tammy Fernandez had a seizure on school grounds. Nearly  
everyone went to that one, but Seth's parents weren't going to be swayed from an overnight trip to  
Seattle. "You didn't even know her," his mother had said, and that was that.  
This coffin, though, is definitely shining back at him, and not like polished wood might. It shines  
back almost like the hood of a really expensive car. In fact, exactly like the hood of a really  
expensive car. It even seems to be made of a kind of black metal. The corners of it are rounded, too.  
Seth's curiosity gets the better of him, and he moves closer. It's strange, stranger than even at first  
glance. Sleek and expensive looking, almost futuristic, like something out of a movie.  
Definitely a coffin, though, as the inside is all white cushions and pillows and –  
"Holy shit," Seth says, under his breath.  
Crisscrossing the bedding are streamers of metallic-sided tape.  
They look as if they've been torn and pulled against, as if someone was tied down by them and that  
person struggled and pulled with all their might until they were free.  
Free to stumble blindly down the stairs before collapsing on the path outside.  
Seth stands there for a long, long time, not knowing what to think.  
An ultra-modern coffin, big enough to hold the nearly fully-grown version of him, yet here in the  
room he left as a child.  
But no coffin for Owen. And nothing for his parents.  
Just him.  
"Because I'm the only one who died," he whispers.  
He puts his hand on the open lid. It's cool, just how he'd expect the metal to feel, but he's surprised  
to find a thin layer of dust on his hand when he takes it away. The inside, though, is almost a blazing  
white, even in the low light from the blind-covered window. It's cushioned with contoured pillows  
on all sides, vaguely in the shape of a person.  
There are torn metallic bandages –"conductive tape" – all the way down the length of it. And tubes,  
too, big and small, some disappearing into the sides of the coffin, their stray ends having left stains  
here and there against the whiteness of the pillows.  
He thinks of the abrasions along his body and how it hurt to pee.  
Had the tubes been connected to him?  
Why?  
He crouches down, shining the torch underneath. The coffin sits on four short rounded legs, and  
from the very middle of the bottom of it, a small pipe goes straight down into the floor. Seth touches  
it. It seems slightly warmer than the rest of the coffin, like there might even be power running into it  
somehow, but he can't be sure.  
He stands up again, hands on his hips.  
"Seriously," he says loudly. "What the hell?"  
He angrily flips up the blind on the skylight. Annoyed, he looks down again to the street below.  
To all the houses that line it.  
All the houses that look as closed up as this one.  
"No," he whispers. "There can't be."  
The next instant, he's running back down his stairs as fast as his exhaustion will let him.


	17. Chapter 17

He heaves a garden gnome as hard as he can at the front window of the house next door. It flies  
through with a satisfyingly loud smash. He clears away the remaining shards with the torch and climbs  
inside. He remembers nothing about the people who lived here when he was a child, except maybe  
they had a pair of older daughters. Or maybe just one.  
Either way, there might have been people here who died.  
Their front room is as dusty and untended as the one in his own house. The layout is more or less  
the same, and he walks quickly back through their dining room and kitchen, finding nothing out of the  
ordinary, just more dusty furniture.  
He runs up the stairs. There's only one landing in this house – the owners not bothering to make the  
attic conversion – and Seth is in the first of the bedrooms before he can even stop to think.  
It's a girl's room, probably a teenager. There are posters for singers Seth's distantly heard of, a  
bureau with some tidied-away makeup on it, a bed with a lavender bedspread, and an obviously  
much-loved and cried-upon Saint Bernard plush toy.  
No coffin, though.  
The story is the same in the master bedroom, a stuffier, overcramped version of his parents'. A  
bed, a chest of drawers, a closet full of clothes. Nothing that shouldn't be there.  
He uses the torch to push open the access hatch to the attic. He has to leap a few times to catch the  
lower rung of the ladder, but it finally clatters down. He climbs up, shining the torch into the open  
space.  
He falls back rapidly from a congregation of surprised pigeons, who coo in alarm and flap wildly  
out through a hole that's come open in the back roof. When it all calms down – and Seth wipes the  
pigeon mess from his hands, suddenly less happy to discover there are birds here – the torch and the  
light from the hole reveal only packed up boxes and broken appliances and more startled pigeons.  
No coffins with anyone inside.  
"All right," he says.  
He tries the house across the street, for no particular reason taking the same garden gnome with him to  
smash through the front window.  
"Jesus," Seth says as he climbs inside.  
It's phenomenally messy. Newspapers piled in every corner, every clear space heaving with food  
wrappers, coffee cups, books, figurines, and dust, dust, dust. He picks his way through. Each room is  
the same. The kitchen looks like something from a hundred years ago, and even the staircase has  
things piled on each step.  
But the rooms upstairs, including the attic, only have mess in them. No coffins.  
The house next door to that one was clearly owned by an Indian family, with brightly colored  
cloths draped over the furniture and photographs of a bride and groom wearing traditional Hindu  
outfits.  
But nothing else, no matter how many rooms he checks.  
He begins to feel a harsh desperation as he heaves the same gnome through the house next door to  
that one. And the house next door to that.  
Each one dusty. Each one empty.  
He is growing more and more tired now, the exhaustion getting harder to fight. In what could be the  
tenth or twelfth house – he's lost count – he can't even throw the gnome hard enough to break the  
window anymore. It bounces to the ground, its eyes leering up at him.  
Seth leans heavily against a white wooden fence. He is filthy again, covered in the dust of a dozen  
houses. A dozen empty houses. Not a single one even making space for a bafflingly shiny coffin in any  
of their rooms.  
He wants to cry, mostly out of frustration, but he checks himself.  
What has he found out, after all? What new thing has he learned?  
Nothing that he didn't think before.  
He's alone.  
However he ended up here, wherever that coffin came from and however he ended up inside it,  
there aren't any for his father or his mother or his brother. There aren't any in the houses up and down  
the street. There are no signs of anyone in the sky or on the train tracks or on any of the roads.  
He really is alone in whatever hell this is.  
Completely and utterly alone.  
It isn't, he thinks, as he trudges back toward his house, the most unfamiliar feeling in the world.


	18. Chapter 18

"Shit, Sethy," Gudmund said, his voice as serious as Seth had ever heard it. "And they blame  
you?"  
"They say they don't."  
Gudmund rolled up on one elbow in the bed. "But that's not what they think."  
Seth shrugged in an offhand way that more or less answered the question.  
Gudmund lightly placed the palm of his hand on Seth's bare stomach. "That blows," he said. He  
ran his hand up Seth's chest, then back again to his stomach and carrying on farther down, but  
gently, tenderly, not asking for anything more again just yet, merely letting Seth know how sorry  
he was through the touch of his hand.  
"Seriously, though," Gudmund said, "what kind of country builds a prison next to people's  
houses?"  
"It wasn't really next to our house," Seth said. "There was like a mile of fencing and guards  
before you got to the actual prison." He shrugged again. "It's gotta go somewhere."  
"Yeah, like an island or the middle of a rock quarry. Not where people live."  
"England's a crowded place. They have to have prisons."  
"Still," Gudmund said, his hand back up to Seth's stomach, his index finger making a slow ring  
on the skin there. "It's pretty crazy."  
Seth slapped the hand away. "That tickles."  
Gudmund smiled and put his hand back in exactly the same spot. Seth let it stay there.  
Gudmund's parents had gone away again for the weekend, and a stinging October rain swarmed  
outside, spattering the windows and raking the roof. It was late, two or three in the morning.  
They'd been in bed for hours, talking, then very much not talking, then talking some more.  
People knew that Seth was staying over at Gudmund's –Seth's parents, H and Monica – but no  
one knew about this. As far as Seth knew, no one even suspected. And that made it feel like the most  
private thing that could ever happen, like a whole secret universe all on its own.  
A universe that Seth, as he did every time, wished he never had to leave.  
"The question, of course," Gudmund said, idly pulling at the hair that tracked down from Seth's  
belly button, "is whether you blame you."  
"No," Seth said, staring up at Gudmund's ceiling. "No, I don't."  
"You sure about that?"  
Seth laughed, quietly. "No."  
"You were just a kid. You shouldn't have had to face that by yourself."  
"I was old enough to know better."  
"No, you weren't. Not to have that kind of responsibility."  
"It's just me, Gudmund," Seth said, catching his eye. "You don't have to pretend to be all wise.  
I'm not a teacher."  
Gudmund took the rebuke with grace and kissed Seth lightly on the shoulder. "I'm just saying,  
though. You were probably as weirdly self-contained back then as you are now, right?"  
Seth nudged him playfully with his elbow, but didn't disagree.  
"And so your parents were probably happy they had this strange little kid who acted like an  
adult," Gudmund continued. "And your mom thought – against her better judgment, we'll give her  
that – she thought it's only a few minutes and it's an emergency, so our little Sethy can watch our  
little Owen for just a second while I run back to the whatever –"  
"The bank."  
"Doesn't matter. It was her mistake. Not yours. But it's too big and awful to blame herself, so  
she blames you. She probably hates herself for it, but still. It's a bullshit bad deal, Sethy. Don't  
buy into it."  
Seth said nothing, remembering that morning more clearly than he wanted to or ever usually  
tried to. His mother had delivered a curse word so loudly when they got back to the house that  
Owen had grabbed Seth's hand in alarm. It turned out she'd managed to walk all the way home  
without realizing she'd left a thousand pounds sitting on the counter at the bank.  
Seth wondered now, for really the first time, what that money could have been for. Everything  
was done electronically, even then, cards and PINs and debits from your bank account. What was  
she going to do with all that cash?  
"I'll be right back," she'd stressed. The bank wasn't the one on the High Street, it was off of it  
and up, a lesser bank his mother had never taken them to before on any other errand. "I'll be ten  
minutes tops. Don't touch anything and don't open the door to anyone."  
She'd practically sprinted back down the hall to their front door, leaving Seth holding Owen's  
hand.  
Ten minutes came and went, and Seth and Owen had only moved from their spot to sit down on  
the floor beside the dining-room table.  
Which is when the man in the strange blue jumpsuit knocked on the kitchen window.  
"I let him in," Seth said now. "She specifically said not to open the door to anyone, and I did."  
"You were eight."  
"I knew better."  
"You were eight."  
Seth said nothing. There was more to the story than just the opening of the door, but he couldn't  
tell even Gudmund that part. He could feel his throat straining, felt the pain rising up from his  
chest. He turned away and lay there on his side, shuddering a little at the effort of crying and  
trying not to.  
Behind him, Gudmund didn't move. "I gotta tell ya, Sethy," he finally said. "You're crying and I  
don't really know how to handle that." He stroked Seth's arm a few times. "I really don't know  
what to do here."  
"It's okay," Seth coughed. "It's okay. It's stupid."  
"It's not stupid. It's just . . . I'm an idiot about these things. Wish I wasn't."  
"Don't worry about it," Seth said. "Just the beer talking."  
"Yeah," Gudmund said, agreeing even though they'd hardly had four bottles between them.  
"The beer."  
They were quiet for a second, before Gudmund said, "I can think of a few things that might  
make you feel better." He pressed his body against Seth's, his stomach against Seth's back,  
reaching around to grab parts of Seth that responded with energy.  
"That'll do," Gudmund said happily into Seth's ear. "But seriously, though, why does there  
even have to be a problem? He survived and they caught the guy and Owen's a nice kid."  
"He's not the same, though," Seth said. "There are neurological problems. He's all1 . . .  
"He's not the same, though," Seth said. "There are neurological problems. He's all1 . . .  
scattered now."  
"Can you really tell that about a four-year-old? That he was one way before and a different way  
after?"  
"Yeah," Seth said. "Yeah, you can."  
"Are you sure, because –?"  
"It's all right, Gudmund. You don't have to fix it. I'm just telling you, okay? That's all. I'm just  
saying it."  
There was a long silence as he felt Gudmund's breath in his ear. He could tell Gudmund was  
thinking, working something out.  
"You've never told anybody else, have you?" Gudmund asked.  
"No," Seth said. "Who could I tell?"  
He felt Gudmund hold him tighter in acknowledgment of the importance of the moment.  
"It's nothing I can change, right?" Seth said. "But imagine there's this thing that always sits  
there in the room with you. And everyone knows it's there and no one will ever say a single  
goddamn word about it until it becomes like an extra person living in your house that you have to  
make room for. And if you bring it up, they pretend they don't know what you're talking about."  
"My parents found the wrong gender of porn on my touchpad last year," Gudmund said. "Guess  
how many times they've talked about it with me since?"  
Seth turned to look at him. "I never knew that. I'll bet they went ballistic."  
"You'd have thought so, but it was just a phase, wasn't it? Nothing that churchgoing and  
pretending it never happened wouldn't make go away."  
"Aren't they suspicious about me coming over all the time?"  
"Nah," Gudmund said, grinning. "They think you're a good influence. I tend to play up your  
athletic abilities."  
Seth laughed.  
"So we've both got messed-up parents who just don't want to know," Gudmund said. "Though, I  
admit, yours are a bit worse."  
"It's not anything, really, good or bad. It just is."  
"It's enough of an anything to make you cry, Sethy," Gudmund said softly. "And that's not  
something that can be any good." He squeezed Seth again. "Not something I like to see anyway."  
Seth didn't say anything, didn't feel like he could without his voice cracking just that second.  
Gudmund let the silence linger for a moment, then he said, brightly, "At the very least, it made  
you guys move out here from England. And if you hadn't, I'd never have learned about this."  
"Quit tugging on it," Seth said, laughing. "You know what a foreskin is."  
"In theory," Gudmund said. "But to think that I used to have one of these and someone had the  
nerve to chop it off without even asking –"  
"Stop that," Seth said, smacking Gudmund's hand away again, still laughing.  
"You sure?" Gudmund moved an arm underneath Seth and pulled him back into a full embrace,  
nuzzling his neck.  
"Hold on," Seth whispered suddenly.  
Gudmund froze. "What?"  
"Just that."  
"Just what?" Gudmund asked, still frozen.  
"Just what?" Gudmund asked, still frozen.  
But how could Seth explain it? Just what?  
Just Gudmund's arms around him, holding him there, holding him tightly and not letting him go.  
Holding him like it was the only place that could ever have existed.  
Just that. Yes, just that.  
"You're a mystery, you are," Gudmund whispered.  
Seth felt Gudmund reach for something off the bed and turned to find Gudmund holding his  
phone up above them.  
"I told you," Seth said, "I'm not taking any pictures of my –"  
"Not what I want," Gudmund said, and he snapped a picture of the two of them from the  
shoulders up, just together, there on the bed.  
"For me," Gudmund said. "Just for me."  
He brought his face around to Seth's and kissed him on the mouth, taking another picture.  
Then he put down the phone, pulled Seth even closer, and kissed him again.


	19. Chapter 19

Seth opens his eyes on the settee and can barely breathe from the weight on his chest.  
Oh, Jesus, he thinks. Oh, no, please.  
Once more, it was so much bigger than a dream that he puts his hands to his face to see if the scent  
of Gudmund's body is still there. That it isn't – but that he can remember the smell, of salt and wood  
and flesh and something intensely private – makes the weight feel so much heavier.  
"Shit," he says, his voice cracking as he sits up. "Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit, shit." He leans forward  
into himself and rocks slowly back and forth, trying to bear how bad it feels.  
The ache of it. The ache of missing Gudmund is so great he can barely stand it. Of missing how  
safe being with him felt, how easy it was, how funny and relaxed. Of missing the physical stuff, of  
course, but more than that, the intimacy, the closeness. Of missing just being held like that, cared for.  
Maybe loved.  
But also the ache of missing something that was his own. His own private, secret thing that  
belonged to no one else, that was no part of the world of his parents or his brother or even his other  
friends.  
Gone.  
Isn't dying once enough? he thinks. Am I going to have to keep doing it?  
But then he thinks, No. Because you can die before you're dead, too.  
Oh, yes, you can.  
So why not after?  
He had been with Gudmund again. And waking feels like death, like a death worse than drowning.  
I can't take this, he thinks. I can't take this.  
He's slept through the night again, it seems. The light around the blinds has the bluish tint of early  
dawn. He doesn't want to get up, feels like he can't, but the pressure on his bladder finally forces him  
up the stairs to the bathroom. Yesterday, after the episode of housebreaking and trying to avoid just  
exactly this kind of dream-filled sleep for as long as he could, he'd gotten the creaking pipes to work  
in the sink and shower. He'd then refilled the long dried-out toilet with glasses of water, and it had  
worked on the first flush, a victory that made him almost embarrassingly happy.  
He goes to it now and does his morning business. Then he washes himself in the cold water of the  
shower, using the hardened block of dishwashing liquid from downstairs as a sticky bar of soap. He  
gasps as he sticks his face again and again into the brutal coldness of the water, trying to snap himself  
into wakefulness.  
Snap him hopefully from the weight still pressing down on him, ready to crush him if he lets it.  
He dries himself off with one of the new T-shirts and heads back down to the main room to put on a  
clean set of clothes. He'll need to get more of these, too, ones more suited to warm weather, and  
maybe some lanterns for nighttime. He needs more food as well. He'll unload the cart from outside  
and then refill it, taking more time to get better things.  
Yes. That's what he'll do.  
Keep moving, he tells himself again. Don't stop. Don't stop to think.  
But he stands there for a minute, over the backpack of clothes, feeling the empty house around him,  
But he stands there for a minute, over the backpack of clothes, feeling the empty house around him,  
feeling the doorway to the kitchen and the farther door that leads outside onto the deck.  
The same door that he'd opened for the man in the jumpsuit.  
And the attic upstairs where he'd waited, by himself, on all those terrible, terrible evenings while  
the hunt for the man and Owen was on, all those evenings when his parents could barely bring  
themselves to look at him or each other, when his dad started taking the go-away pills he never quite  
gave up.  
Seth hadn't told Gudmund everything, even when he could have, even when the chance was there  
for –  
For what? Forgiveness? Absolution?  
If he could have taken forgiveness from anyone, he could have taken it from Gudmund. He could  
have done it right then, and even now he isn't sure why he didn't.  
He remembers being there, lying in bed with Gudmund, being held as close as it was possible to  
be, having shared a story he'd never told anyone besides his parents and the police.  
His chest begins to ache again, dangerously so, and he says, "Right. Right."  
He heads outside to start bringing food in from the cart, trying as hard as he can not to cry again.  
He makes three trips to the supermarket before the morning is through. It's mostly cans and the few  
bottles of water that look tolerable, but he's also found some sugar that's not too hard to chip chunks  
out of and some dried meats vacuum-packed in plastic that may not be too petrified to eat. He's found  
a couple bags of flour, too, though he doesn't really know what he might do with them.  
He gathers a few camping lanterns from the outdoor store and finds some more clothes at a small  
Marks & Spencer around the corner from it. The shirts and shorts are boring enough to make him look  
like his father, but at least he's not having to wear snow gear in midsummer, which makes him  
wonder what will happen if he's still here for whatever passes for winter in hell.  
When the sun's in the middle of the sky, he uses the camp stove to heat up more spaghetti. He does  
it at the same spot in the park where he ate yesterday, looking down the hill again at the grass and the  
crystal clear pond beyond.  
He nearly drops the can when he sees a pair of ducks sunning themselves on the rock in the center  
of it. There's nothing special about them as ducks per se, just plain brown ones, squabbling quietly to  
each other.  
But still. There they are.  
"Hey!" Seth shouts down at them, without thinking. They fly off almost immediately, quacking in  
alarm. "Hey, come back!" he calls after them. "I brought you here. I did that!"  
They disappear over some trees.  
"Ah, well," he says, taking another bite of spaghetti. "It's not like I could shoot you for dinner."  
He looks up. Could he? Well, he'd need a gun first, and he thinks immediately of the outdoor store

And then he remembers this is England, or at least his mind's version of it. You couldn't buy a gun  
here anything like how easy it was in the U.S., where he could actually have got one at the local  
shopping mall, going to McDonald's before and seeing a movie after. His parents were appalled, and  
talked about it for years with joyous European indignation, while never allowing one in the house.  
The result being that Seth has barely seen a gun up close, much less shot one.  
So that ruled out hunting, probably, at least in the short term. His can of spaghetti, though, is  
So that ruled out hunting, probably, at least in the short term. His can of spaghetti, though, is  
suddenly looking a lot less appetizing than a roast duck. Not that he'd know how to roast it. Or if you  
even could on a butane camp stove.  
He sighs and takes another bite, using the spoon he remembered to bring this time. He's tired but  
not as tired as he was the day before. He wonders if he's finally catching up on the sleep you need  
when you first die, which, granted, must be an exhausting thing to happen. Probably the most  
exhausting thing that ever could happen.  
He looks back down to the now-empty pond and notices something new. The tall grasses up and  
down the hill are swaying a bit in the breeze. More than a bit, actually. They're being blown by a  
wind Seth can now feel against his face. He looks up.  
For the first time, there's something in the sky. Clouds. Great big puffy ones. Great big puffy black  
ones scurrying this way.  
Seth can't believe his eyes. "It rains in hell?"  
He barely makes it back to the house before the skies open up. The storm is a summer one, and Seth  
can still see blue sky on the horizon, so it won't last, but boy, does it pour. He watches it from the  
doorway of his house as it quickly soaks the dusty streets to mud and streaks dirt across the windows  
of the dead cars.  
The smell is outrageously good. So clean and fresh, Seth can't help but step out into it, letting it  
drench his upturned face, squinting as the drops hit his eyes. The rain is surprisingly warm, and he  
suddenly gasps, "Idiot!" He races back inside to grab the hardened bar of dishwashing liquid. How  
much nicer would this be than the freezing cold shower he had this morning –  
He jumps back out the front door, but the rain is already tapering away, blowing out of the  
neighborhood as quickly as it came.  
"Damn," he says. The wind up high must be blowing something wicked because the rain clouds are  
leaving like they're being chased by a mob, out past the back of Seth's house and carrying on to –  
Where?  
Yeah, where would they be going?  
How big is hell?  
Big enough for weather, obviously. The sun is back out, the breeze dying down, and steam already  
rising as the mud dries back into dust on his street.  
A street he's been up and down several times but not much beyond.  
Maybe it's time to do some exploring, he thinks.


	20. Chapter 20

He feels tired again after the morning's exertions but resists taking a nap, dreading the vivid dreams  
even more after last night's. Instead, he packs the backpack with a few supplies and a bottle of water  
and heads out for a walk.  
He takes a moment to decide which direction. To the left is all the High Street stuff he's seen  
several times already. Of course there are neighborhoods behind that, sprawling for miles before, if  
he remembers correctly, changing into farmland as they head east.  
To the right is the train station.  
I could walk all the way to London on that track, he thinks, and that's somehow vaguely cheering.  
What does it matter if he has no phone to show him maps and no Internet to look things up? If he  
follows the train tracks one way, he could walk all the way to London.  
Not that he's going to. It's bloody miles.  
He stops. Bloody. He actually thought "bloody miles." His parents didn't even say bloody  
anymore, American slang having almost thoroughly obliterated everything but his mum's insistence  
that he call her "mum."  
"Bloody," he says, testing it out. "Bloody, bloody, bloody." He looks up. "Bloody sun."  
It's shining down brightly again, even hotter than before, the mud almost already thoroughly dried.  
This certainly isn't the cold, damp English weather his parents always complained about. Nor is it  
really what he remembers from living here, though the memories of an eight-year-old about weather  
might not be the most reliable. But still. It's a lot hotter than he's been led to believe. With the steam  
rising from the ground, it's almost tropical. Which is a word no one ever used to describe England.  
"Weird," he says, then he resettles his backpack and heads to the right, toward the train station.  
The roads he crosses are the same as everywhere else, dusty and empty. He thinks it's going to be  
worth starting some kind of systematic look through the houses, a more thorough search through the  
ones whose windows he's already smashed and then spreading out across the neighborhood. Who  
knows what useful stuff could be found? More cans of food, maybe, tools and better clothes. Maybe  
one or more of them has a vegetable garden –  
He stops in his tracks. The allotments, he thinks.  
Of course. A whole huge field of private little gardens, tucked away behind a . . . what was it? He  
tries to remember. A sports center? Yes, he thinks that's what it was, a sports center on the other side  
of the train tracks, with a field of allotments behind it. Sure there'd be weeds, but there'd have to be  
edible things still growing there, right?  
He quickens his step, remembering almost automatically to turn up the long concrete stairway that  
runs between two apartment buildings – blocks of flats, he remembers. The English terms keep  
coming, and he wonders if his accent will return as well. Gudmund was always trying to make him  
"talk British," always wanting him to say –  
He stops, the feelings of loss coming again, strong. Too strong.  
Keep going, he thinks. As long as you can.  
The stairway reaches a sidewalk that leads up to the train station, which rests on top of a little rise.  
He can see the station building now. To get to the allotments, he'll have to walk through it, cross the  
bridge between platforms, and go out the far side. He's almost feeling excited about it as he passes  
through the entrance, hopping over the ticket gates without a second thought, and up the short stairs to  
the first platform –  
Where there's a train waiting.  
It's a short one, just four cars, a commuter train meant to shunt people back and forth to the city up the  
tracks, and he half expects passengers to start emptying out the doors or for the train to start pulling  
slowly away from the platform.  
It doesn't, of course. It just sits there, silent as a rock from the earth, covered in the dust of this  
place. There are weeds growing up all along the cracks of the platform and even some in the gutters  
along the train's roof. Like the cars on the streets outside, it hasn't moved in a long time.  
"Hello?" he calls. He walks across the platform to look in through a window, but it's mostly dark,  
the windows so badly dusted over they block out most of the afternoon sun. He pushes the open button  
on the closest door, but there's no power running through it and it stays firmly shut.  
He looks down the length of the train. At the front, the door to the driver's compartment has come  
open. He walks to it, takes the torch out of the backpack and sticks his head inside the driver's  
compartment. There's only one seat behind the controls, which surprises him. He'd have thought  
there'd be two, like in airplanes. The screens on the dash are all either cracked or dusted over, dark  
without power.  
There's a door inside to the rest of the train, and it's open, too. Seth steps up into the compartment  
and shines the light through the inner doorway, down the central aisle of the first car.  
It smells. Animals have clearly been in here. There's a fug of urine and musk, and the dust on the  
linoleum floor of the aisle is disturbed and streaked in any number of unpleasant ways. He can  
imagine all kinds of foxes huddled under seats now, watching him with his torch, wondering what  
he'll do.  
What he does is look around, almost overwhelmed with memories. The sun is bright enough for a  
dim light through the filthy windows, many of which are scratched with unintelligible graffiti, but  
there's enough to see the blue cross-hatch pattern on the cloth of the seats. He runs a hand down one,  
burring the fuzz with his fingertips.  
The train. The train.  
He hasn't been on a train since he left England. Not once. Americans on the west coast didn't take  
trains. They drove. Everywhere. This is literally the first time he's set foot on board a train since they  
crossed the ocean.  
And everything the train had meant when he was young! Trips up to London and all the city had to  
offer a boy of six and seven and eight. The zoo, the Wheel, the wax museum, the other museums that  
were less interesting because they had no wax. Or down the other way, too, to the coast, with its  
castles on hills and the great big white cliffs that his mum wouldn't let him or Owen anywhere near.  
And the pebbly beaches. And the ferries to France.  
Trains always went somewhere amazing when you were eight years old. They were a way out of  
the same houses and the same faces and the same shops. It seems embarrassing now, to have been so  
excited by a simple train journey that millions of people took every day, but Seth can feel a little  
smile spread across his face as he steps farther down the car, shining the torch on the overhead racks  
and the assorted blocks of seats, two here, three there, and at the back of the car, the little boxed door  
to the horrible train toilet that Owen, without fail, would need to use within five minutes of the train  
leaving the station in whatever direction.  
Seth shakes his head. He'd almost forgotten trains existed. Looking at it now, he can't believe how  
exotic they seemed to him as a little boy.  
Still, though, he thinks. A train.  
Which is when the door to the bathroom crashes open and a monster comes roaring up the aisles  
straight for him.


	21. Chapter 21

Seth yells in terror and runs back down the aisle, risking a quick look back –  
A huge, black shape hurtles toward him –  
Screeching and roaring in what sounds like rage –  
Two eyes staring back at him in unmistakable malevolence –  
Seth flies into the train driver's compartment, slamming into the control panels, crying out at a pain  
in his hip. He scrambles over the driver's seat, and there's a terrible moment when the strap of his  
backpack gets caught, but gets loose as the shape comes smashing inside.  
Seth leaps out the door of the train and takes off, tearing down the platform, dropping the torch and  
leaving it behind. He looks back again, just as the shape comes rocketing out of the compartment,  
sending the door swinging back and forth violently. The thing turns and comes after him.  
Running a lot faster than Seth is.  
"Shit!" he yells, pumping his arms and trying to remember his cross-country form, though that was  
for long distances, not for sprinting, and he's still not even remotely fully recovered from –  
There's a squeal behind him.  
(a squeal?)  
As he turns up the steps to the bridge over to the other platform, he takes another look back.  
The shape is the biggest, ugliest, dirtiest wild boar he's ever seen.  
A wild boar? he thinks, charging up the stairs. A wild BOAR is chasing me?  
The boar rages down the platform and up the steps behind him, and Seth can see it's got a pair of  
filthy, splintered-looking tusks that would happily tear the stomach right out of him.  
"SHIT!" he screams again, running across the flat part of the bridge, but he's so tired, so weak still,  
that he's not going to outrun the boar. It's going to catch him before he reaches the stairs that go down  
the other side.  
I'm going to be killed, he thinks, by a PIG. In HELL.  
And the thought is so stupidly outrageous, so insanely angry-making, that he almost misses the  
chance to save himself.  
The bridge is a corridor above the tracks, covered on both sides by square panels of frosted glass,  
broken by a metal guardrail at waist height. Right near the stairs at the other end of the bridge, two of  
the upper panels have fallen out in succession.  
Leaving a space just big enough for someone his size to climb through.  
The boar squeals again, barely five feet behind him, and he's not going to reach the windows, he's  
not going to reach them, he's not –  
He leaps for them and can actually feel the boar slamming its head into the bottom of his feet as he  
jumps. The momentum nearly carries him all the way out, and there's an impossible few seconds  
where it seems like he's going to fall straight back down to tracks twenty feet below, but he catches  
the upright support between the windows, manages to get one foot on the metal strip, and – swinging  
his free arm and leg wildly into the air – keeps his balance by a whisker.  
Just before he's nearly knocked off it again by the boar slamming into the wall at his feet.  
"ALL RIGHT! ALL RIGHT!" he shouts, and there's nowhere to go but up. He grabs a gutter above  
"ALL RIGHT! ALL RIGHT!" he shouts, and there's nowhere to go but up. He grabs a gutter above  
him and pulls himself up to the roof of the bridge. The boar keeps slamming against the railing as Seth  
hooks a leg up and rolls himself, panting heavily, onto the roof, his backpack lurched uncomfortably  
beneath him.  
He just lies there for a moment, desperately trying to catch his breath. The boar is still going at it,  
grunting and squealing and ramming its weight against the inside wall of the bridge, knocking out  
another glass panel, which tumbles to the tracks, smashing into a thousand pieces.  
Seth leans back over the side and looks down at the boar, who snuffles angrily up to him. It's  
enormous, so much bigger and taller and wider than any normal pig, it almost seems like a cartoon.  
It's hairy, too, and blackened by a thick layer of dirt. It squeals loudly at him.  
"What did I ever do to you?" Seth asks.  
The boar squeals once more and starts re-attacking the bridge.  
Seth rolls onto his back again, looking up into the sky above.  
He thinks he can remember stories about them breaking free from boar farms and going feral, but  
he'd never thought they were actually real. Or even if he was remembering it right.  
But, you know, once again, hell, he supposes.  
He keeps lying there, waiting for his breath to return to normal and his heart to slow down. He  
scoots the backpack out from under himself and gets the bottle of water. Down below, he can at last  
hear the boar giving up. It snuffles and snorts, making a defiant last grunt, and he hears its amazingly  
heavy tread back across the bridge beneath him. He can see it come down the bottom of the stairs to  
the platform before it disappears behind the train, no doubt returning to whatever den it's made for  
itself in the train's toilet.  
Seth laughs. And then louder.  
"A boar," he says. "A bloody boar."  
He drinks the water. He's looking out the way he came, and the view isn't bad. He stands,  
balancing on the slightly curved roof of the footbridge, and he can even see the top floors of the stores  
on the High Street. His own house is too low to see, but he can see the neighborhood leading down to  
it.  
To the left, behind where his house is, is the start of the cleared areas that lead farther down to the  
prison.  
He stares at them for a moment. The fences and walls are all still there, with some of the empty  
spaces between them actually free of all but the sparsest of weeds. He can't see the prison itself. It's  
down in a small valley and behind a row of thick trees and more barbed wire and brick.  
But he knows it's there.  
Just the presence of it strikes a weird chord through his stomach. Like it's watching him back.  
Watching to see what he'll do.  
Waiting for him to come to it.  
He turns away, thinking he'll see if he can find the allotments from here, find an easy way to get to  
them. He raises his hand to shield his view from the sun –  
And sees that everything on the other side of the tracks – the sports center, the allotment fields,  
dozens upon dozens of streets and houses stretching to the horizon – has burnt to the ground.


	22. Chapter 22

The land slopes down on the other side of the train station, spreading out into the shallowest of  
valleys with barely perceptible rises several miles to either side. It stretches back and back, street  
upon street, toward Masons Hill – whose name Seth remembers now – the only real rise for miles  
around, a wooded lump on the landscape, with one sheer side that falls fifty feet to the road below, a  
place where youths were routinely rousted for dropping rocks on passing cars.  
Everything between the train station and that distant hill is a blackened ruin.  
Some blocks are nothing more than ash and rubble, others still have husks of brick, their roofs and  
doors gone. Even the roads have buckled and bent, in some places indistinguishable from the  
buildings they separated. There's a stretch of ground where Seth is pretty sure the sports center was,  
and he can see what looks like the remnants of a large square hole that could have been its swimming  
pool, now filled with charcoal and weeds.  
Though not as many weeds as the streets behind him, he notices. And not as tall. There are weeds  
and grasses scattered through the rest of the burn, now that he thinks to look for them, but they're far  
scraggier than the ones on his own street, and some of them are just plain dead.  
There's no sign at all of the field where the allotments were. He thinks he can see where his  
memory tells him it should be, but amongst all the ash and burnt timber and blasted concrete, it could  
also just be his imagination trying to make it be there.  
The destruction stretches on for what must be miles, as far both to the left and right as he can see in  
the hazy sunshine. The fire – or whatever it was; destruction this big may have even been some kind  
of bomb – stretches all the way back to Masons Hill, stopping around its base much like it stops at the  
rise where the train station sits. Too much bare concrete to cross to actually burn down the station.  
He's looking at a wasteland. One that seems as if it might as well go on forever.  
It explains all the dust, is the first thing Seth really thinks. The layers upon layers of it, covering  
nearly everything in the streets behind him. It's not just dust – it's ash, dropped from whatever this  
huge fire was and never cleaned away.  
It's also, in a way that troubles him more than he can really say, a past event. Something caught  
fire, or was blown up, or whatever happened, and then that fire raged out of control before burning  
itself out some time later, taking most of this neighborhood with it.  
Which means that there was a time before the fire, a time of the fire, and a time after the fire.  
He thinks he's being foolish feeling troubled about this – there are weeds growing everywhere,  
obviously, and the food didn't rot in an instant – but those things were just time, time passing in  
stillness.  
But a fire is an event. A fire happens.  
And if there was an event, then there was also a was for it to happen in.  
"When, though?" Seth says to himself, shielding his eyes from the sun and scanning up and down  
the ruins.  
Then he turns back to his own neighborhood on the other side of the tracks.  
What if the fire had happened over there rather than here? What if his own house had burnt down,  
not all these empty ones of strangers?  
Would he have woken up at all?  
On the other hand, he thinks, is this my mind trying to tell me something?  
On the other hand, he thinks, is this my mind trying to tell me something?  
Because the blackened ground feels like a barrier, doesn't it? Feels like a place where hell stops.  
He's gone out exploring and reached an area that might as well have a sign on it saying, DO NOT PASS.  
The world, this world, suddenly feels a whole lot smaller.  
He suddenly doesn't feel much like exploring anymore today. Silently, he drops his backpack  
through the window of the bridge and climbs down after it. He heads back down the stairs, taking care  
to tread quietly when he retrieves the torch so as not to disturb that huge, alien boar from the train.  
Then he shoves his hands in his pockets, hunches his shoulders down, and trudges on home.


	23. Chapter 23

"What do you expect us to say?" his mother asked, angrily. "How do you expect us to react?"  
His father sighed and crossed his legs in the other chair facing Seth. They were in the kitchen,  
which – and Seth wondered if they even knew they did this – was where they always had their  
serious talks with him, especially when he got in trouble.  
He was in here way more often than Owen ever was.  
"It's not that we," – his father looked up in the air, trying to find the right word –"mind, Seth –"  
"What are you talking about?" his mother snapped. "Of course we goddamn well mind."  
"Candace –"  
"Oh, I can already see the thinking here. You're already halfway to forgiving him –"  
"Why is it a question of forgiveness?"  
"Always just this laissez-faire approach, not giving a damn as long as you can do your precious  
little projects. It's no wonder he's acted like an idiot."  
"I'm not an idiot," Seth said, arms crossed, looking down at his sneakers.  
"What the hell do you call it?" his mother demanded. "How exactly is this situation not one big  
idiotic catastrophe for you? You know what they're like here –"  
"Candace, that's enough," his father said, more strongly now. His mother made a sign with her  
hands of sarcastic surrender, then stared firmly at the ceiling. His father turned to look at him,  
and Seth realized with a shock how rare it was for his father to look him straight in the eye. It was  
like having a statue suddenly ask you for directions.  
The thing was, though, Seth couldn't even say that his mother was wrong. About it being a  
catastrophe. The pictures had been found. Had gotten out. From an impossible source, one they'd  
never expected. But then they'd been stupid to ever think they wouldn't, because how could you  
keep anything for yourself in this uselessly connected world?  
"Seth," his father continued, "what we're trying to say is that . . ." He paused again, thinking  
how to phrase it. For a horrible moment, Seth thought he was going to have to help him along, say  
the words for him. "Whatever . . . choices you make, we're still your mum and dad, and we'll still  
love you. No matter what."  
There was a long, uncomfortable silence at this.  
No matter what, Seth thought, but didn't say. "No matter what" had happened eight years ago. It  
had come and gone, and it turned out it hadn't been true then, either.  
"But this . . ." – his father sighed again –" . . .situation you've got yourself into –"  
"I knew we couldn't trust that boy," his mother said, shaking her head. "I knew he was bad  
news from the moment I met him. Right down to his stupid name –"  
"Don't talk about him that way," Seth said, quietly but the anger in his voice shocked both his  
parents into silence. He'd only been able to see Gudmund today for just enough time to tell him, to  
warn him, before Gudmund's parents had thrown Seth out of their house. "Don't you ever talk  
about him in any way, ever again."  
His mother's mouth dropped open. "How dare you speak to me like that? How DARE you think  
you can –"  
"Candace –" his father said, trying to stop her as she rose from her chair.  
"You can't possibly think you're going to see him again."  
"You can't possibly think you're going to see him again."  
"Just try and stop me," Seth said, his eyes burning.  
"Enough!" his father shouted. "Both of you!"  
There was a moment of stand-off as Seth and his mother locked eyes, but she eventually sat back  
down.  
"Seth," his father said, "I'd like you to think about maybe taking some antidepressants, or even  
something stronger –"  
His mother let out a cry of exasperation. "That's your answer to this? Disappear into oblivion  
like you do? Maybe you can both do silent DIY projects for the rest of your lives."  
"I'm just saying," his father tried again, "Seth is obviously struggling with something –"  
"He's not struggling with anything. He's crying for attention. Can't bear that his little brother  
needs more care than he does, so he goes and does something like this." She shook her head.  
"Well, you're only hurting yourself, Seth. You're the one who's going to have to go to school next  
week, not us."  
Seth felt a twisting in his gut. She'd nailed exactly what had been worrying him.  
"You don't have to go if you don't want to," his father said. "Not until this blows over. Or we  
can change schools –"  
His mother gave another exasperated gasp.  
"I don't want to change schools," Seth said. "And I'm not going to stop seeing Gudmund."  
"I don't even want to hear his name," his mother said.  
His father looked pained. "Seth, don't you think you might be a little young to be taking  
decisions this enormous? To be doing these . . . things with . . ." He trailed off again, not quite  
able to say "another boy."  
"And all this when you know how much we've got to deal with for Owen right now," his mother  
said.  
Seth rolled his eyes. "You always have to deal with Owen. That's what your whole stupid life is.  
Dealing With Owen."  
His mother's face hardened. "You have the gall to say that? You, of all people?"  
"What's that supposed to mean?" Seth spat back at her. "'Of all people'?"  
"All we're saying," his father said, talking loudly over them both, "is that you could have come  
to us. You can come to us with anything."  
And there was another long silence that none of them bothered to fill, as perhaps they all  
wondered if that was true.  
Seth looked down at his feet again. "What's wrong with Owen now?" he asked, unable to stop  
himself from putting all his anger into the last word.  
His mother's answer was to rise quickly to her feet and leave the kitchen. They heard her  
stomping upstairs, heading straight for Owen's room, heard him start an excited explanation  
about the new video game he'd gotten at Christmas last week.  
Seth looked at his father in confusion. "What's she so mad about? How does any of this hurt  
her?"  
His father frowned, but not at Seth. "It's not entirely you. Your brother's scans came back."  
"The ones because of his eyes?"  
Owen's eyes had started a strange twitching a few weeks back. He could see something when it  
was directly in front of him, like his computer games or his clarinet, but walking anywhere had  
become a wild hazard of knocking things over or simply falling all the way down to the ground.  
He'd given himself four bloody noses in the past ten days.  
"The neurological damage," his father said. "From . . . from before."  
Seth looked away, almost automatically.  
"It was either going to get worse or better as he grew," his father said.  
"And it's got worse."  
His father nodded. "And will continue to do so."  
"So what happens now?"  
"Surgery," his father said. "And cognitive therapy. Almost every day."  
Seth looked back up. "I thought you said we couldn't afford that."  
"We can't. Insurance only covers so much. Your mum's going to have to go back to work to help  
with the costs and it's going to eat badly into our savings. We've got rough times ahead, Seth."  
Seth's mind was reeling, for his brother, for their money troubles, for the fact, he was ashamed  
to think, that he had college tuition payments starting in the fall that were going to need some of  
those very savings and if they weren't there –  
"So, this whole thing with you and your friend?" his father said. "Not the best timing in the  
world."  
Laughter rang down the staircase. They turned to look, even though there was nothing to see.  
Seth's mother and Owen, sharing something between the two of them, just like they always did.  
"When is it ever good timing?" Seth asked.  
His father patted him on the shoulder. "I'm sorry, son," he said. "I really am."  
But when Seth turned back around, his father had broken eye contact.


	24. Chapter 24

It's raining again the next morning when Seth wakes, though it takes him a few minutes to notice  
because of how the dream is still ringing through him.  
He lies motionless on the settee. He still hasn't slept in any of the beds upstairs; his own in the attic  
is far too small for him now, even if he wanted to use it, which he doesn't, and sleeping in his  
parents' bed just feels too weird, so he's stayed on this dusty couch, under the terrified eye of the  
horse above the mantelpiece.  
Dreaming.  
The weight in his chest has grown heavier, almost too heavy to move.  
The greatest thing with Gudmund had been the secrecy of it all. When they were together like that,  
they had been their own private universe, bounded just by themselves, a population of two. They were  
the world, and the world was them. And no one deserved to know, not his mum and dad, not his  
friends, no one, not then, not yet.  
Not because it was wrong – because it definitely wasn't that – but because it was his. The one  
thing that was entirely his.  
And then the world found out, his parents found out. Those two photos Gudmund took, painfully  
innocent compared to what some of the boys at school sent their girlfriends, but so private, so  
something that no one else should have seen, that Seth burns even now with anger and humiliation.  
His mother had been right. Going back to school had been a nightmare. The whole world changed  
in an instant, collapsed to a place where Seth almost didn't even live. After Christmas vacation was  
over and he'd stepped back onto school grounds, there had been only him and everyone else. Far  
away. Beyond reach. The school tried to clamp down on the worst of the abuse, but they couldn't  
catch it all. And the whispers were everywhere; his phone vibrated constantly, even throughout the  
night, with jeering texts. Nor did he dare look on any social networking, where the picture – and  
accompanying comments – seemed to be everywhere. His private universe exposed to the egged-on  
scorn of all.  
But he couldn't leave. Gudmund was still out of school while his parents decided what to do about  
him. And Seth had to be there, for whenever he came back. He had to bear it, alone.  
"Self-contained," Gudmund had described him, but what that really meant was that it felt like he'd  
had a private burden to shoulder for as long as he could remember, and maybe not all of it even to do  
with what happened to Owen. Worse, it had been accompanied by an equally hard lifelong yearning, a  
feeling that there had to be more, more than just all this weight.  
Because if there wasn't, what was the point?  
That had been the other great thing about Gudmund since that surprising spring night at the end of  
junior year when they had become more than just friends. It was suddenly as if, for the briefest of  
moments, the burden had been lifted, like there was no gravity at all, like he had finally set down the  
heavy load he'd been carrying –  
He knows he should stop this thinking, knows he should get moving, keep himself occupied with  
simply surviving this place, but he feels like he's at the bottom of a well, with sunshine and life and  
escape all miles away, no one to hear him, even if he could call for help.  
He's felt like this before.  
He lies there, listening to the rain, for a long, long time.  
He lies there, listening to the rain, for a long, long time.  
Eventually, biology again forces him to get up. He has a pee, then stands at his front door. The rain  
pours, rivulets coursing everywhere through the mud. He wonders for a moment why it doesn't just  
wash away, but he sees that the street is slowly becoming a stagnant flood, great ponds forming at  
blocked drains, everything swirling together in a muddy mess.  
It's nearly as warm as it was yesterday, so he gets the block of dishwashing liquid, leaves his  
clothes in a heap, and uses the rain as a shower right there on the front path.  
He lathers himself up, making a soapy mop of his buzzed-off hair, then closes his eyes and lifts his  
face to the rain to let it all rinse off. Almost idly, he tries to see if playing with himself will have any  
results, but the weight on his chest is too heavy, the memories of everything too much. He gives up  
and just crosses his arms, letting the soap slowly wash off him, the suds slopping down to the brown  
water gathering on the footpath.  
Have I done this? he thinks, pulling his arms tighter around himself. Have I brought this rain?  
Have I made this place even more miserable?  
He stands there, motionless, until he begins to shiver.  
The rain isn't that warm after all.  
It rains all through the day, the flooding on the street getting bad down at one end, but most of it near  
his house draining slowly into the sinkhole before it gets too deep. He hopes the fox and her kits are  
all right.  
He heats up a can of potato soup. While it cooks, he looks out to the back garden, watching the rain  
come down on the deck and the now-soaking pile of bandages. The sky is a uniform gray, impossible  
to separate out any individual cloud, just solid rain from horizon to horizon, however far away those  
horizons might be. When the soup is hot, he takes two mouthfuls before losing his appetite and leaving  
the rest by the switched-off camp stove.  
There's no television, of course. No computer. No electronic games. For lack of anything better, he  
takes a book from the bookcase. It's one of his father's, one Seth has already read part of years ago,  
sneaking it from the shelf in America when his father wasn't looking. It was far too old for him at the  
time and, he smiles wryly, is probably too old for him now. There's large quantities of good-spirited  
sex, metaphors that run on just for the hell of it, and plenty of philosophical musing about immortality.  
There's also a satyr who features heavily, which Seth remembers was the thing that got him caught.  
He'd asked his father about "satire," having heard that word said out loud and assuming it was the  
one he was reading. After a lengthy, baffled explanation, his father had said, "Why on earth are you  
asking?" and that had been the end of that reading adventure. He remembers now that he'd never  
actually been able to sneak it off the shelf again to find out what happened in the end.  
So he reads on the settee, letting the rain continue and the day pass outside. At some point in the  
afternoon, he grows too hungry not to notice and heats up a can of hot dogs, eating half and leaving the  
rest beside the cold can of potato soup. When dusk comes, he lights one of the lanterns he took from  
the outdoor store, sending stark shadows around the room but illuminating enough to see the pages.  
He forgets about dinner.  
A book, he thinks at one point, rubbing his eyes, tired from so much focused reading. It's a world  
all on its own, too. He looks at the cover again. A satyr playing pan pipes, far more innocent-looking  
than what it got up to in the story. A world made of words, Seth thinks, where you live for a while.  
"And then it's over," he says. He's only got about fifty pages left; he can finally find out what  
happens in the end.  
And then he'll leave that world forever.  
He folds down a corner to mark his place and sets the book on the coffee table.  
It's fully dark now, and he realizes he's never seen this place at night. He picks up the lantern and  
stands in the front doorway again, keeping out of the rain, which seems lighter now but still steady.  
He's amazed at the unyielding blackness. Not a single other light is shining back at him, not a  
streetlight or porchlight or even that glow that's always on the horizon from the gathered lights of a  
city. Here, there's nothing. Nothing but darkness.  
He flicks off the lantern, and for a moment, the world disappears completely. He stands there,  
breathing into it, listening to the rain. Slowly, slowly, his eyes begin to adjust to a dim light, which  
can only be the moon behind the clouds. The neighborhood starts to resolve itself into house fronts  
and gardens, the mud now swirled in rivers and deltas on the sidewalk and street.  
Nothing stirring, nothing moving.  
And then, suddenly, a break in the clouds, shining starlight that's faint but like the blowing of a  
trumpet compared to the darkness. Because it's so dark, Seth can see more stars in the small rip in the  
sky than he thinks he's ever seen in the whole expanse of it. The break widens, shining more, and Seth  
can't quite figure out the strange streak of faint white he's seeing across it, as if someone's spilled –  
Milk.  
The Milky Way.  
"Holy shit," he whispers.  
He's seeing the actual Milky Way streaked across the sky. The whole of his entire galaxy, right  
there in front of him. Billions and billions of stars. Billions and billions of worlds. All of them, all  
those seemingly endless possibilities, not fictional, but real, out there, existing, right now. There is so  
much more out there than just the world he knows, so much more than his tiny Washington town, so  
much more than even London. Or England. Or hell, for that matter.  
So much more that he'll never see. So much more that he'll never get to. So much that he can only  
glimpse enough of to know that it's forever beyond his reach.  
The clouds close up again. The Milky Way vanishes.


	25. Chapter 25

It's late, later than he's ever stayed up here. He's feeling tired, but he doesn't want to sleep. He  
doesn't think he can take another memory or dream or whatever. They've grown increasingly painful,  
and he knows, without wanting to think about it too closely, that there's worse to come.  
He flicks the lantern on again as he goes back inside. He pauses for a moment, wondering what to  
do, then, on a whim, heads up the staircase. He's not interested in the attic – the thought of the coffin  
up there, in the blackness of the unlit night, freaks him out more than a little – but there's the office,  
isn't there? His mum's, mainly – his dad had one at the college – but with all the family files.  
He sets the lantern on the desk and, without much hope, tries the computer. Of course nothing  
happens. The huge tower unit and the hilariously non-flat monitor – he can't remember the last time he  
saw one of those – stay as inert and dark as they were before.  
He looks through some of the papers scattered on the desktop, coughing a little at the raised dust.  
It's mostly old bills, but there are a few scraps of paper, some with what he instantly, almost  
shockingly, recognizes as his mother's handwriting.  
DCI Rashadi? he reads on one. He remembers the name, though he hasn't heard it in eight years.  
The policewoman who stayed with them during the hunt for Owen, the one who was so kind when she  
gently repeated questions of Seth. Below her name, there's a phone number with Masons Hill and  
police dogs written under it, which is less familiar. There weren't any searches in that part of town,  
Seth doesn't think. Owen was found in an abandoned warehouse. An anonymous tip had come in, the  
source of which was never traced, but the police had found Owen and the prisoner –  
The prisoner –  
The prisoner.  
Seth can't remember the prisoner's name.  
He reads the notes again. DCI Rashadi makes sense, as does another page with the names of PC  
Hightower and PC Ellis, who were the first officers to arrive after his mother's frantic phone call.  
And they were hunting for –  
Seth frowns. How could he possibly have forgotten the name of the man who took Owen? The name  
of the man from whom Owen had barely escaped with his life? The name of the man now rotting  
forever in England's highest security prison because of a multitude of crimes, not just breaking out of  
jail and kidnapping Owen?  
"What the hell?" Seth whispers.  
He can't remember it. At all. It's like there's a pure blank spot in his memory. Everything around it  
is still there. He'll never forget the man's face, for one thing, or the prison jumpsuit.  
Or the things he said.  
But his name.  
His name, his name, his name.  
Forgetting it is impossible. He'd heard it over and over and over again as the manhunt went on.  
He'd even said it in that dream with Gudmund –  
Hadn't he?  
But it's not there. It's just not there, no matter how much he pursues it.  
He reaches for the top drawer of the filing cabinet. There has to be something in there, clippings of  
the man's arrest or official police statements or –  
He stops with his hand on the drawer handle. There's a picture frame face down on top of the filing  
cabinet. Dust has gathered on the back of it, but even as Seth lifts it up into the lantern light, he knows  
what it is.  
There they all are. Him, his mother and father, and Owen, with – of all people – Mickey freaking  
Mouse. Seth smiles at it. He can't help himself. They'd taken the train to Disneyland Paris. The  
sixteen-year-old part of him would like to scoff and say that the trip was stupid and that the park was  
only for little kids and the rides were lame and nothing at all like the roller coasters he ended up  
going on in America –  
But that wasn't how it had been. It had been bloody brilliant. And that was it exactly, bloody  
brilliant. From their lives before anything changed. From their lives when anything had seemed  
possible.  
From their lives before Owen had disappeared for three and a half days with the convicted killer  
whose name refuses to surface in Seth's head. Three and a half days of policemen and policewomen –  
though it was usually policewomen, like Officer Rashadi – sitting in their house every hour that Owen  
was gone, trying to reassure his parents even when such a thing was clearly impossible. His mother  
was alternately rageful and scarily calm. His father spoke in a slur brought on by the medication he'd  
been given after he'd been unable to stop crying on the first day.  
Neither of them spoke to Seth much. In fact – he tries to remember – they might not have spoken to  
him at all.  
He'd spoken far more to Officer Rashadi. She was small, with her hair pulled back behind a cloth,  
but something in her manner had immediately silenced his mum's demands and his father's anguished  
crying within five minutes of her walking through the door. Seth had liked the way she didn't talk to  
him in a funny adults-for-kids type voice, liked how it sounded as if every word she said was true.  
With the lightest of touches, she'd questioned him again and again about what had happened, saying  
that if he could remember anything more, no matter how small or stupid, he should tell her because  
who knew what might help his brother?  
"The man had a scar on his hand," Seth had said the fourth or fifth time they talked. He'd made a  
circle with his thumb and forefinger to show her how big the scar was.  
"Yes," Officer Rashadi said, not writing it down in her notebook. "He had a tattoo removed."  
"Is that important?" Seth asked. "Or is it stupid?"  
She'd just smiled at him, her front two teeth slightly crooked but bright as moonlight.  
He remembers all of that now but can't remember the name of the man they were talking about, as if  
that information has somehow been erased from his memory altogether.  
He looks down at the photo again. Owen and Mickey are in the middle, Owen smiling so wide it  
looks physically painful, and his mum and dad on either side, grinning with slight embarrassment but  
also, he can see, having a great time in spite of themselves.  
And there's Seth, smiling, too, looking at Mickey a little more shyly and keeping his distance – he  
remembers being freaked way the hell out by the giant brightness of the suit and the grin that never  
changed and the weird silence of Mickey in person, though he supposes it would have been even  
weirder if Mickey spoke French.  
In the photo, there's a little gap between him and his family, but he's not going to put too much  
emphasis on that. Just an accident of photography, where he'd probably stepped back from Mickey  
just as it was taken.  
Because he's still smiling. He still is.  
He doesn't know what's to come, Seth thinks, putting the picture back on top of the filing cabinet.  
He doesn't look back at it as he leaves the office and shuts the door behind him.


	26. Chapter 26

He spends the time until dawn keeping himself active so he doesn't fall asleep. He digs himself deep  
into a new book – the one about the satyr still sitting there unfinished on the coffee table – and when  
he's in danger of nodding off, he gets up and paces the room. He fixes himself a can of spaghetti, but  
again eats only half before setting it beside the unfinished soup and hot dogs from earlier.  
Dawn comes with a slight let up in the rain. It's now more mist than anything, but still coming  
down, muddy water swirling everywhere outside.  
Seth starts to feel weirdly hyper from the lack of sleep, and he thinks that what he'd most like to do  
is go for a run. Cross-country season was long over when he drowned, and he'd only been able to get  
in a few runs in the bad weather they'd had over the winter.  
His mum had kept up her running, though, almost out of spite. The worse the weather, the better she  
liked it. She'd come back soaking wet, her breath making clouds in the air. "Jesus, that's good," she'd  
growl, panting heavily just inside the doorway, swigging her bottle of water.  
It had been years since she'd asked Seth to join her.  
Not that he would have said yes.  
Well, maybe. Probably not. But maybe.  
But he misses it, the running. Trapped in this house, he misses it more than ever. Misses the rhythm  
of it, the way his breathing eventually just slotted into place, the way the world kind of fell toward  
him, like he was standing still and the whole planet was turning underneath him instead.  
It was solitude, but it was solitude that wasn't lonely. Solitude that could sort things out. And he  
hadn't had that in ages.  
No wonder everything had gotten so screwed up by the end of that winter.  
He looks again out the front window. The mist is still there, the world still gray.  
"Next time the sun's out," he says, "I'm running."  
He's stuck inside through the day and into the evening. The clocks in the house, of course, are all  
stopped, so he can only guess how quickly time is passing.  
More than anything, he doesn't want to sleep. He tries stupid things to keep himself awake. Singing  
at the top of his lungs. Attempting to perfect a handstand. Trying to remember all fifty states (he gets  
up to forty-seven, goes absolutely crazy trying to remember Vermont, gives up).  
He gets colder as the night draws in again. He lights every lantern and makes his way upstairs to  
his parents' bedroom to steal more blankets. He wraps them around himself and paces up and down  
the main room, trying to think of something, anything, to keep his mind occupied, to stave off both  
sleep and boredom.  
And loneliness.  
He stops in the middle of the main room, the blankets wrapped around him like robes.  
The loneliness. In his accumulating exhaustion, the terrible loneliness of this place swamps him,  
just like the waves he drowned in.  
No one here. No one at all besides him. No one.  
Forever.  
"Shit," he says under his breath, starting to pace faster than ever. "Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit."  
"Shit," he says under his breath, starting to pace faster than ever. "Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit."  
He feels like he's underwater again, fighting for breath. His throat chokes shut, just like it did as he  
was forced under yet another freezing wave. Fight it, he thinks, panicking. Fight it. Oh shit, oh shit –  
He stops in the middle of the floor, only dimly aware that he's letting out a slight moan. He even  
raises his head, like he's reaching for air that's getting farther and farther away.  
"I can't take this," he whispers into the shadowy darkness above him. "I can't take this. Not  
forever. Please –"  
He flexes and unflexes his hands, pulling at the blankets that suddenly feel like they're suffocating  
him, dragging him farther down. He lets them drop to the floor.  
I can't hold it back, he thinks. Please, I can't hold it back –  
And then he sees in the lantern lights that the blankets have swept the dust away in a pattern on the  
floor as he paced. The polished floorboards are actually glinting back at him slightly.  
He nudges a bunched-up blanket with his foot, leaving a stripe of clean floor beneath it. He pushes  
it farther along the floor to the wall, wiping away more dust. He picks up the blanket. The underside  
is filthy, so he folds it to a cleaner side and pushes it along the wall to the hearth.  
He looks back. A big stripe of the floor is now relatively clean.  
He folds the blanket again and follows the wall around the room, then the floor around the settees,  
folding and refolding as necessary until he cleans almost the entire floor. He tosses the dirty blanket  
into the middle of the kitchen and picks up another, folding it into a square and wiping down the  
dining-room table, coughing some at the dust he churns up, but once again, the surface mostly shines  
back at him.  
He wets the corner of a smaller blanket in the sink and scrubs away the heavier dirt on the dining  
table before moving to the inert television. Every time a blanket gets too dirty, he piles it in the  
kitchen and gets another. Soon enough, he's upstairs in the linen cupboard, taking out painfully stiff  
towels and sheets and using them to wipe down the hearth and windowsills.  
A kind of ecstatic trance overtakes him, his mind on nothing but his actions, which are manic,  
focused, seemingly unstoppable now that he's set them in motion. He cleans off the bookcase shelves,  
the slats in the doors to the cubbyhole, the chairs around the dining-room table. He accidentally  
breaks a bulb in the overhead light as he tries to rid them of cobwebs, but he just wraps the glass in a  
blanket and adds it to the pile.  
He wipes away the remaining dust from the mirror hanging over the settee. Dirt still clings to the  
glass, so he picks up one of his wetted rags and presses harder on the mirror, scrubbing away in  
repeated motions, trying to get it clean.  
"Come on," he says, hardly aware that he's speaking aloud. "Come on."  
He steps back for a second from the effort and stands there panting. He raises his arm to go back to  
it –  
And in the lantern light, he sees himself.  
Sees his too-skinny face, his short cropped hair, sees the dark whiskers sprouting below his nose  
and under his chin, though not so much on his cheeks, where he's despaired of ever being able to  
grow a beard.  
Sees his eyes. Sees how they're the eyes of someone being hunted. Or haunted.  
And in the mirror, he sees the room behind him. A hundred times more livable than it was before he  
started on this frenzy, a frenzy he can't really explain to himself.  
But there it is. A clean or at least cleaner room. He's even cleared the dust from the terrible,  
But there it is. A clean or at least cleaner room. He's even cleared the dust from the terrible,  
terrible painting of the dying horse. He looks at it now in reflection, its eyes wild, its tongue like a  
spike of terror.  
And he remembers.  
This cleaning. This straightening out of things. This frenzy of order.  
He's done it before. To his own bedroom back in America.  
"No," he says. "Oh, no."  
It was the last thing he did before he left his house.  
The last thing he did before he went down to the beach.  
The last thing he did before he died.


	27. Chapter 27

"Don't you think I hate it, too?" Gudmund whispered fiercely. "Don't you think it's the last thing  
I want?"  
"But you can't," Seth said. "You can't just . . ."  
He couldn't say it. Couldn't even say the word.  
Leave.  
Gudmund looked back nervously at his house from the driver's seat of his car. Lights were on  
downstairs, and Seth knew Gudmund's parents were up. They could discover he was gone at any  
moment.  
Seth crossed his arms tightly against the cold. "Gudmund –"  
"I finish out the year at Bethel Academy or they don't pay for college, Sethy," Gudmund  
practically pleaded. "They're that freaked out about it." He frowned, angry. "We can't all have  
crazy liberal European parents –"  
"They're not that crazy liberal. They'll barely even look at me now."  
"They barely looked at you before," Gudmund said. Then he turned to Seth. "Sorry, you know  
what I mean."  
Seth said nothing.  
"It doesn't have to be forever," Gudmund said. "We'll meet up in college. We'll find a way so  
that no one –"  
But Seth was shaking his head.  
"What?" Gudmund asked.  
"I'm going to have to go to my dad's college," Seth said, still not looking up.  
Gudmund made a surprised move in the driver's seat. "What? But you said –"  
"Owen's therapy is costing them a fortune. If I want college at all, it has to be on the faculty  
family rate where my dad teaches."  
Gudmund's mouth opened in shock. This hadn't been their plan. Not at all. They were both  
going to go to the same college, both going to share a dorm room.  
Both going to be hundreds of miles away from home.  
"Oh, Seth –"  
"You can't go," Seth said, shaking his head. "You can't go now."  
"Seth, I have to –"  
"You can't." Seth's voice was breaking now, and he fought to control it. "Please."  
Gudmund put a hand on his shoulder. Seth jerked away from it, even though the feel of it was  
what he wanted more than the world.  
"Seth," Gudmund said. "It'll be okay."  
"How?"  
"This isn't our whole lives. It isn't even close. It's high school, Sethy. It's not meant to last  
forever. For a goddamn good reason."  
"It's been –" Seth said to the windshield. "Since New Year, since you weren't there, it's been –"  
He stopped. He couldn't tell Gudmund how bad it had been. The worst time of his life. School  
had been nearly unbearable, and sometimes he'd gone whole days without actually speaking to  
anyone. There were a few people, girls mostly, who tried to tell him they thought what was  
happening to him was unfair, but all that did was serve to remind him that he'd gone from having  
three good friends to having none. Gudmund had been pulled out of school by his parents. H was  
hanging out with a different crowd and not speaking to him.  
And Monica.  
He couldn't even think about Monica.  
"It's a few more months," Gudmund said. "Hang in there. You'll make it through."  
"Not without you."  
"Seth, please don't say stuff like that. I can't take it when you say stuff like that."  
"You're everything I've got, Gudmund," Seth said quietly. "You're it. I don't have anything  
else."  
"Don't say that!" Gudmund said. "I can't be anyone's everything. Not even yours. I'm going  
out of my mind with all this. I can't stand the fact that I have to go away. I want to kill someone!  
But I can take it if I know you're out there, surviving, getting through it. This won't be forever.  
There's a future. There really is. We'll find a way, Seth. Seth?"  
Seth looked at him, and he could now see what he hadn't seen before. Gudmund was already  
gone, had already put his mind into Bethel Academy, sixty-five miles away, that he was already  
living in a future at UW or WSU, which were even farther, and maybe that future included Seth  
somehow, maybe that future really did have a place for the two of them –  
But Seth was only here. He wasn't in that future. He was only in this unimaginable present.  
And he didn't see how he'd ever get from here to there.  
"There's more than this, Sethy," Gudmund said. "This sucks beyond belief, but there's more.  
We just have to get there."  
"We just have to get there," Seth said, his voice barely above a whisper.  
"That's right." Gudmund touched Seth's shoulder again. "Hang in there, please. We'll make it.  
I promise you."  
They both jumped at the sound of a door slamming. "Gudmund!" Gudmund's father shouted  
from the porch, loud enough to wake the neighbors. "You'd better answer me, boy!"  
Gudmund rolled down his window. "I'm here!" he shouted back. "I needed some fresh air."  
"Do you think I'm an idiot?" His father squinted into the darkness where Seth and Gudmund  
were parked. "You get back in here. Now!"  
Gudmund turned back to Seth. "We'll e-mail. We'll talk on the phone. We won't lose contact, I  
promise."  
He lunged forward and kissed Seth hard, one last time, the smell of him filling Seth's nose, the  
bulk of his body rocking Seth back in the seat, the squeeze of his hands around Seth's torso –  
And then he was gone, sliding out the door, hurrying back into the glow of the porchlight,  
arguing with his father on the way.  
Seth watched him go.  
And as Gudmund disappeared behind another slamming door, Seth felt his own doors closing.  
The doors of the present, shutting all around him, locking him inside.  
Forever.


	28. Chapter 28

It takes Seth a moment to realize he's on the floor. He doesn't remember lying down, but he's  
cramped and stiff, like he's been there for hours.  
He sits up. He feels lighter.  
Like he's almost empty.  
The weight from the dream feels like it's in the room somewhere, and he's distantly aware of it, but  
of himself, he feels –  
Nothing. He feels nothing.  
He gets to his feet. The sleep has returned some of his strength. He flexes his hands, rolls his neck,  
stretches.  
Then he sees that small beams of sun are pouring through the cracks in the blinds.  
The rain has stopped. The sun is back out.  
And he promised himself a run, didn't he?  
Keeping his mind clear, he changes into a pair of shorts and one of the new T-shirts. His sneakers  
aren't proper running shoes, but they'll do. He debates whether to take one of the bottles of water but  
decides to leave it behind.  
He skips breakfast. He's barely eaten in the last day and a half, but there's a purpose in his chest  
that feels like it's feeding him.  
It's the same purpose he felt when he went down to the beach.  
He lets the thought slide through his head and out the other side.  
There is nothing this morning.  
Nothing at all.  
Nothing but running.  
He goes to the front door. He doesn't shut it behind him.  
He runs.  
It was cold, possibly below freezing when he left his house that afternoon, having meticulously  
cleaned his room without really knowing why, without somehow even really being aware of doing  
it, just getting everything in its right place, neat and tidy and final, so nothing was left undone.  
His mother had taken Owen to therapy and his father was working in the kitchen. Seth walked  
down the stairs to the living room. His eyes caught that horrible painting by his uncle, the horse,  
in terror, in agony, but stilled, forever, watching him go, watching as he closed the front door  
behind him.  
It was a good half hour walk to the beach, the sky threatening snow but not delivering. The sea  
that day wasn't as monstrous as it often was in winter. The waves were shallower, but still  
reaching, still grabbing. The beach as rocky as ever.  
He stood there for a moment, then he started to take off his shoes.  
Seth runs toward the train station, leaving footprints in the drying mud, his legs creaking and groaning  
from lack of this kind of use. He turns up the stairs between the blocks of flats, heading to the station.  
His first sweat is on, the drops stinging his eyes as they drip from his forehead. The sun is blazing  
His first sweat is on, the drops stinging his eyes as they drip from his forehead. The sun is blazing  
down. His breathing is heavy.  
He runs.  
And as he runs, he remembers.  
He runs faster, as if he might escape it.  
There was sand there, between the rocks, and he stood on a little patch of it to remove first one  
shoe and then the other. He set them carefully together, then he sat on a rock to take off his socks,  
folding them and tucking them deep inside his shoes.  
He felt . . . not quite calm, calm wasn't the right word, but there were moments, moments when  
he wasn't focused on the precise folding of his socks when he felt almost faint with relief.  
Relief because at last, at last, at last.  
At last, there didn't have to be anymore, didn't have to be anymore burden, anymore weight to  
carry.  
He took a moment to try and shake off the tightening in his chest.  
He breathed.  
Seth leaps over the ticket barrier at the train station and pounds up the steps to the platform. He  
doesn't look at the train as he heads for the bridge over the tracks. He hears nothing from the boar, no  
doubt sleeping away a hot day in the confines of its den.  
Up the steps, across the bridge, and down the other side.  
He took off his jacket, because that seemed right, too. He was only wearing a T-shirt underneath,  
and the wind stung his bare arms. He shivered more as he folded up his coat and placed it on his  
shoes.  
He felt present there, but also separate at the same time, as if he was watching himself from a  
height, looking down on a shoeless, coatless boy, staring at the sea.  
Like he was waiting.  
But for what?  
Whatever it was, it never come.  
And then, "I'm ready," he whispered to himself.  
He found, to his surprise, with a sudden upsurge of grief that nearly knocked him flat, that he  
was telling the truth.  
He was ready.  
He began walking toward the sea.  
He leaps over the gate at the other side of the train station and out the far exit. He pounds down the  
incline toward the first main road, wincing at the strain on his feet, but his muscles seem to be  
awakening, returning to the memory of themselves, returning to the memory of running –  
He takes the first running steps into the destroyed neighborhood.  
Everything around him is dead.  
The cold of the water was shocking, brutally so, even in those first steps, and he couldn't keep  
himself from gasping. A wave of gooseflesh marched up his arms, the thin black hairs standing  
almost vertical. It felt for a moment as if he had already started to drown ankle-deep in five inches  
of water.  
He knew then that if the water didn't get him, the cold would.  
He forced himself to take another step.  
And another.  
It's so quiet, all he can hear are his footfalls and his breathing. In this first street, everything's been  
flattened, so there's only blackened ground reaching out on either side. He kicks up clumps of ash into  
the air, some of it drying now in the sun and making a trailing cloud.  
He turns his gaze forward again.  
Toward Masons Hill.  
His feet – almost blue with cold – went numb as they stepped from rock to rock. Each new shock as  
he waded in deeper was like a knife slicing into him, but he pressed on. The water reached his  
knees, his thighs, darkening his jeans to black. There was a long shallows, but he knew it deepened  
suddenly a little farther out to depths that had to be swum. He also knew there was a current, one  
that would take an unsuspecting swimmer and smash them into the rocks that loomed down the  
beach.  
He was so cold now that it felt as if his skin had been dipped in acid. A larger wave splashed  
across his T-shirt, and he couldn't help but call out. He was shaking uncontrollably and had to  
force himself to keep moving forward.  
Another wave came, larger than the last and he almost lost his balance. Another followed that.  
He wouldn't be able to stand for much longer, his feet and toes gripping hard on the submerged  
rocks, the tide pulling forward and back. He readied himself to let go, to plunge in, to begin the  
swim out into the farther cold, out into the terrible, terrible freedom that awaited.  
He was here. He had made it this far. There was so very little distance left to go, and he was the  
one who had brought himself here.  
It was almost over. He was almost there.  
He had never, not once in his life, felt this powerful.  
Down another street, the concrete frames of some houses are still standing, though burnt through,  
inside and out. Not just houses, but storefronts and larger structures, too.  
All blackened, all empty, all dead.  
His throat is burning, and he thinks he should have brought water. But the thought is fleeting and he  
lets it go.  
Masons Hill remains firmly on the horizon, and that's all he needs.  
He feels empty. Emptied of everything.  
He could run forever.  
He feels powerful.  
Then a wave, larger than any before, engulfed him, plunging him under the freezing water. The  
cold was so fierce it was like an electric shock, sending his body into a painful spasm. He was  
afloat, twisting underwater, narrowly avoiding cracking his skull on an outcropping.  
Coughing, spluttering, he broke the surface as another wave crashed down. He surged up again,  
his feet scrambling for purchase, but the undertow was already pulling him out fast. He spat out  
seawater and was thrust under by another wave.  
(He fought; despite everything, he was fighting –)  
The cold was so enormous it was like a living thing. In an impossibly short time, he was unable  
to make his muscles work properly, and though he could still see the empty shore in the seconds he  
had above water, it receded farther and farther into the distance, the current pushing him toward  
the rocks.  
It was too late.  
There was no going back.  
(He felt himself fighting anyway –)  
Seth picks up his speed, his breath starting to come in raking gasps, pushing the memories away, not  
letting them take root.  
I'll make it, he thinks. I'll make it to the hill. Not far now.  
Another street, and another street more, empty buildings all around, reaching up like tombstones,  
his breath getting louder in his lungs, his legs growing weaker.  
I'll make it. I'll run up to the top –  
Here is the boy, running.  
Here was the boy, drowning.  
In those last moments, it wasn't the water that had finally done for him; it was the cold. It had  
bled all the energy from his body and contracted his muscles into a painful uselessness, no matter  
how much he fought to keep himself above the surface –  
(And he did fight in the end, he did –)  
He was strong, and young, nearly seventeen, but the wintry waves kept coming, each one  
seemingly larger than the last. They spun him round, toppled him over, forcing him deeper down  
and down.  
He doesn't think about his final destination as he runs, not in words. There is only intention. There is  
only a lightness.  
The lightness of it all being over. The lightness of letting it all go.  
Then, without warning, the game the sea seemed to have been playing, the cruel game of keeping  
him just alive enough to think he might make it, that game seemed to be over.  
The current surged, slamming him into the killingly hard rocks. His right shoulder blade  
snapped in two so loudly he could hear the crack, even underwater, even in this rush of tide. The  
mindless intensity of the pain was so great he called out, his mouth instantly filling with freezing,  
briny seawater. He coughed against it, but only dragged more into his lungs. He curved into the  
pain of his shoulder, blinded by it, paralyzed by its intensity. He was unable to even try and swim  
now, unable to brace himself as the waves turned him over once more.  
Please, was all he thought. Just the one word, echoing through his head.  
Please.  
Please, he thinks –  
There is the sheer drop on one side of Masons Hill. He can see it in the distance.  
Fifty feet down to concrete below –  
Please –  
The current gripped him a final time. It reared back as if to throw him, and it dashed him headfirst  
into the rocks. He slammed into them with the full, furious weight of an angry ocean behind him.  
But it didn't make him free.  
He woke up here.  
Here where there is nothing.  
Nothing but a loneliness more awful than what he'd left.  
One that is no longer bearable –  
He is nearly there. One last turn. One more long street, and he'll reach the base of the hill.  
He turns a corner –  
And in the distance, far down the road in front of him, he sees a black van.  
And it's moving.


	29. Chapter 29

He stops so suddenly he falls, burying his hands in inches of ash.  
A van.  
A van that's driving away from him.  
A van that's being driven.  
It's going slowly, heading off into the distance, kicking up a low cloud of ash behind it, but there it  
is, solid as the world.  
There's someone else in hell.  
Seth staggers upright, waving his arms over his head before he can even think if it's a good idea or  
not.  
"Wait!" he shouts. "WAIT!"  
And almost immediately, the van stops. It's far enough away that it shimmers in the heat rising from  
the drying ash, but it definitely stops.  
It definitely heard him.  
Seth watches, his heart racing, his lungs laboring for air.  
The door to the van opens.  
And a pair of hands slap themselves over Seth's mouth from behind and drag him off his feet.


	30. Chapter 30

The hands bend Seth back so far he can hardly keep his balance. He tries to fight but finds himself so  
weakened – by lack of food and sleep, by the running, by the sheer weight on his chest – that all he  
can do is stumble backward, trying not to fall –  
Despite how strangely small the hands seem –  
They're pulling him off the street, toward the shell of a collapsed structure that may once have been  
several stories high but is now a place of broken concrete walls and surprisingly dark shadows.  
Someone might do anything to him if they got him inside there.  
He drops his weight to the ground, falling to the ash-covered pavement and taking his attacker with  
him.  
"Ow!" a voice shouts, and Seth rolls back, fists up, ready to fight whoever it is that's suddenly  
materialized out of seeming thin air –  
But it's just a boy.  
He can't be more than eleven or twelve and is a good foot shorter than Seth. No wonder it felt so  
awkward; it was like a monkey hanging on to a giraffe.  
"No!" the boy whispers in obvious panic. "We have to get off the street!"  
He's already rising, looking past Seth down to the van. Seth turns, too. In the shimmering heat, he  
isn't sure whether he can see a figure, standing next to it –  
The boy grabs Seth's T-shirt. "Come! You must!"  
Seth smacks his hands away. "Get off me!"  
"No, you must," says the boy, and Seth notices he speaks with an accent, maybe eastern European.  
Behind him, Seth can see a bike discarded in the ash at the front of the burnt-out building. The boy  
turns and calls, "Regine!"  
A tall, heavyset black girl, much closer to Seth's age, maybe even older, emerges from the shadows  
of the building, pedaling her own bike. Seth can see past her to a band of sunlight at the back which  
must be the opening they rode through. Clearly out of breath, the girl glares at Seth. "Jesus Christ, you  
run fast."  
"Who are you?" Seth demands. "What the hell –"  
"We have to go!" the boy insists, pointing down the road. "The Driver!"  
They all look. The door to the van has shut. The van is moving again, turning around in a circle.  
So that it can come back this way.  
The girl jumps off her bike, her face newly terrified. "Tommy! Hide!" she shouts. The boy takes the  
bike from her, grabs his own, and drags them into the darkness of the structure. The girl takes two  
fistfuls of Seth's shirt, trying to pull him there, too.  
She's much stronger than the boy.  
"Get your hands off me," Seth says, struggling.  
She brings her face close to his. "If you don't hide with us right now, you're going to die."  
"She is not lying!" the boy says, popping up from behind a low wall in the structure, worry all over  
his face. "Please come!" He disappears behind the wall again, which seems to conceal a small,  
impromptu cave made out of fallen concrete slabs. He pulls the bikes in after him.  
The girl is still yanking on Seth's shirt, so hard it's starting to tear. He resists her and looks down  
the road again. The van has made its way through the circle. It's starting back down the road after  
them.  
What the hell? he thinks. Seriously, what the hell?  
The girl makes a frightened yelp, lets him go, and flees into the structure.  
And that's what makes Seth finally move. Her fear.  
He runs after her into the darkness.  
The shadows inside are so deep and black, Seth goes sun-blind for a minute.  
"Quickly!" the girl says, pulling him down after her, over the low wall and into the small alcove,  
made even smaller by the boy and the bikes. Seth takes a moment to wonder why he never thought of  
finding a bike.  
"This is ridiculous," he says. "It'll see us –"  
"It'll think we followed our tracks back out," the girl says, "if we're lucky."  
"And if we're not lucky?"  
She holds up her finger to stop him.  
And he can hear it now, too.  
The engine of the van. Almost here.  
The boy lets out a whimper. "It is coming."  
The boy and the girl press back farther into the blackness of the little alcove, which now seems  
pathetically small to protect all three of them, tight against the bikes, sweating, panting, trying not to  
make a sound.  
The van stops outside. Seth hears the door opening.  
An arm moves across his chest. The boy, reaching for the girl. She takes the boy's hand and holds it  
tightly.  
No one breathes.  
Seth hears footsteps, crunching across the ash. One person, Seth thinks, just one pair of feet.  
And then he sees it, stepping into the shadows of the structure.  
Impossibly in this heat, every inch of its skin is covered, fingertip to neck, in a black, syntheticseeming  
material, almost like a wetsuit. Its face is hidden by a sleek helmet with features molded for  
nose and chin, but completely blank otherwise, just a smooth, metallic blackness.  
Like the coffin on the top floor of Seth's house.  
Seth hears a slight breath at his right. In the shadows, the boy has his eyes squeezed shut and his  
lips are moving furiously, like he's reciting a prayer.  
The figure stops almost directly at their feet, its side turned to them. It only has to look in the right  
place, it only has to bend down and take one farther glance –  
It steps past the alcove, out of Seth's line of sight. He feels the girl exhale, but she holds her breath  
again as it walks back the other way. It stops once more, looking at the disturbances in the ash,  
disturbances that Seth is sure will lead it right to them. In its hand, Seth sees it's holding an ominous  
black baton, one that looks for all the world like a serious, serious weapon.  
The figure – the Driver, the boy called it – is inexplicably terrifying. It's got a man's shape, but  
something about the blackness of its clothes, something about the way it holds its body –  
Isn't quite human, Seth thinks.  
Isn't quite human, Seth thinks.  
There is no mercy in it, that's what it is. Nothing to appeal to. It might kill you, like the girl said,  
but it would do so without you ever being able to convince it not to and without you ever knowing  
why you were dying.  
It steps toward their alcove.  
Seth feels the boy's hand grip the girl's more tightly across his chest –  
But the Driver stops. It's motionless for a second, then it steps back, walking quickly out of sight.  
Seth hears the door to the van slam, hears the engine rev, hears the van drive off.  
"Thanks be to God," the boy whispers.  
After waiting another moment to be sure it's gone, they crawl out of the alcove. The boy and the  
girl stand in the slanted sunlight, the boy looking sheepish, the girl defiant.  
"Who are you?" Seth asks. "And what the hell was that?"  
They look at him for a moment. Then the boy's face scrunches up with tears. The girl rolls her eyes,  
but she opens her arms. The boy falls into her, grabbing on to her tightly, weeping into her embrace.


	31. Chapter 31

"Who are you?" Seth asks again, still staring. "What's going on?"  
"He's kind of emotional," the girl says, holding the boy. "I think it might be a Polish thing."  
"That's not what I meant."  
"I know that's not what you meant." She lets go of the boy, whose chin is still wobbling. "We're  
good, Tommy. We're good."  
"Safe?" the boy asks.  
The girl shrugs. "As safe as we can be."  
She's English, Seth notices, and her eyes are tired and baggy, her clothes that same combination of  
brand new and ash-covered as his own. She's quite tall, taller than Seth, and her hair is pulled tight  
across her scalp by a clip at the back of her head. As for the boy, he's so short it's almost comical.  
Seth notes, too, the way his hair is that same spectacularly messy pile that Owen always wore. For a  
moment, he feels an unexpectedly deep pang for his brother.  
"I'm Regine," the girl says. "This is Tomasz." She pronounces the names Ray-zheen and Tohmawsh.  
Both she and the boy look at Seth expectantly.  
"Seth," he says. "Seth Wearing."  
"You're American," Regine says. "That's a surprise."  
"How do you know he is American?" Tomasz asks her.  
"The accent."  
Tomasz smiles bashfully. "I still cannot tell. You all sound the same to me."  
"I was born in England," Seth says, his confusion growing again. "I was born here. Wherever the  
hell here is."  
The girl starts pulling the bikes out of the alcove. "You'll have to ride with him," she says to  
Tomasz. Tomasz groans loudly but takes a bike from her. "Come on," the girl says to Seth. "We really  
can't hang around."  
"You expect me to come with you?" he says.  
"We don't have time to fight about this. You can come with us or not –"  
"Regine!" Tomasz says, shocked.  
" – but if you stay here, the Driver will find you and you really will die."  
Seth doesn't answer. He doesn't know what to answer. The girl stares back at him, and he sees her  
looking at his running clothes, his lack of water, sees her considering the way he was running,  
furiously, with purpose. She glances behind him, out to the landscape.  
Out to Masons Hill.  
It's close, so close he could dash out of here right this second and run up it –  
But that intention is less clear now. That feeling of release is gone, for the moment. The feeling that  
would have driven him up to the top.  
To the edge of the sheer cliff.  
They stopped him. In the nick of time.  
And he considers this, too.  
A boy and a girl, appearing from nowhere, stopping him just before he started up the hill, just  
A boy and a girl, appearing from nowhere, stopping him just before he started up the hill, just  
before he met the black van.  
Which also appeared from nowhere.  
Did he call them into being? Did he make them arrive?  
Just in time?  
But Tomasz and Regine. Preposterous names, foreign, even here.  
And the van. And the Driver.  
What was that all about?  
"Are you real?" Seth asks, quietly, almost to himself.  
The boy nods a sympathetic yes.  
"I know why you're asking," the girl says. "But the only answer I've got is that we're as real as you  
are."  
Seth breathes. "What if that doesn't feel very real at the moment?"  
The girl looks like she's understood him. "We really do need to get going. Are you coming?"  
He doesn't know what he should do, what he's supposed to do. But there's no denying that –  
whoever they are, whatever they might be – they feel a lot safer than the Driver does.  
Seth says, "All right."


	32. Chapter 32

Regine's bike kicks up clumps of drying ash as she goes. Seth rides a short distance behind her,  
standing on the pedals. Tomasz sits on the bicycle seat, gripping Seth around the torso tighter than is  
probably necessary.  
"I do not like this," Tomasz says. "You are too tall. I cannot see."  
"Just hold on," Seth says.  
They ride through ashy streets, sticking close to where Regine and Tomasz's original tracks are,  
watching for the van around every corner.  
"Who was that?" Seth asks. "What was that?"  
"Explanations later," Regine answers.  
"She saw it before," Seth hears from behind his back. "She saw what it does."  
"Explanations later," Regine says again, pedaling harder.  
They ride around another corner, and another, making their way to the train station. The bicycle  
tracks in the ash are parallel to Seth's footprints on the journey out. "You were following me," he  
says.  
"We were trying to catch you," Tomasz says.  
"How did you know where I was?"  
"Later," Regine snaps as they turn the last corner. "We've got to get away from – SHIT!"  
The black van is there, waiting for them.  
Regine swerves so hard she falls off her bike. Seth struggles to keep his own balance as Tomasz  
leaps off to help her. The van is down the road at an angle to them, clearly anticipating they'd come  
out from one of three streets. They've taken the one it obviously expected the least, but it's already  
revving its engines to make the turn after them.  
Though now that he's got a full view, Seth sees that "van" isn't the right word for it at all. Sleek  
and unearthly, its corners are rounded, its windows tinted so dark they almost seem of a single piece  
with the van itself. There are no other identifying marks on it at all. Even the ash and dust don't seem  
to be sticking to it. It's just a hard, cool piece of blackness in the gray landscape.  
Just like the helmet the Driver was wearing.  
Just like the coffin in Seth's house.  
"The bridge!" Regine shouts, righting her bicycle, not even pausing when Tomasz leaps on the seat  
behind her. "Before it can turn!"  
She pedals off, unsteadily at first, but with increasing speed. She veers away from the front of the  
van, the quick dart of the bicycle skating past the bulkier vehicle, but that isn't a matchup they're  
going to win for long. Seth rides after her, leaping up on an ashy sidewalk to avoid the van swerving  
at him.  
Seth can see the bridge she means. Down from the train station, the tracks go over a brick archway.  
It's half collapsed onto the road below, but there's a space on the right big enough for a bike to go  
through.  
But not big enough for a van.  
Seth pedals past Regine, who's struggling with the weight of Tomasz. There's a surge in engine  
Seth pedals past Regine, who's struggling with the weight of Tomasz. There's a surge in engine  
noise, and when they look back, they see that the van has made its turn.  
And is coming after them, at full speed.  
"We are not going to make it!" Tomasz calls.  
"Hang on!" Regine yells, her legs pumping frantically.  
Seth looks back again. The van is bearing down on them.  
Tomasz is right. They aren't going to make it.  
Without stopping to think, Seth veers hard to the right, sending up a wave of ash and turning back  
the way he came.  
"What are you doing?" Regine screams.  
"Go!" he yells back. "Just go!"  
He rockets past them in the opposite direction, heading straight for the van.  
"NO!" he hears Tomasz cry, but he keeps on, picking up speed.  
"Come on," he says as he rides toward the van. "Come on!"  
It doesn't stop or veer.  
Neither does Seth.  
"COME ON!" he screams.  
They're fifty feet apart –  
Thirty –  
The van's engine revs –  
And right before impact, it pulls violently to the left, hitting a cracked curb and skidding into the  
burnt foundations of a house.  
Seth makes another hard turn in the ash. "Go! Go! Go!" he yells at Regine and Tomasz, who've  
slowed to watch him. She starts pedaling again and disappears into the narrow opening under the  
bridge. Seth hurtles after them. They hear the engine revving again, but they ride without looking back,  
through the darkened dip under the bridge and out the other side.  
"Will it come after us?" Seth shouts.  
"I don't know!" Regine says. "We should get to your house and hide."  
"My house?"  
"The next crossing point is a bunch of streets north," Regine says, Tomasz still hanging on to her.  
"We don't think it knows where you live –"  
"How do you know where I live?"  
"We'll hide the bikes," she continues, ignoring him. "It usually doesn't come over to this side at all

"Usually?"  
Regine grunts in annoyance as they turn another corner. "There's a lot we don't know."  
"But we do know some things," Tomasz says.  
"Like what?" Seth says.  
"Like we were right to follow you," Tomasz answers cheerfully. "Because you saved us."  
"What did I save you from?" Seth asks as they finally start slowing their pace. "What was that  
thing?"  
Tomasz looks at him and says, "Death. It was death."


	33. Chapter 33

"Not actual death," Regine says as they hide the bikes in an overgrown garden two streets up from his  
house. "We call it the Driver."  
"Maybe actual death," Tomasz says.  
Regine rolls her eyes. "Not a skeleton in a cloak with a . . ." She makes a motion with her hands.  
"Scythe?" Seth suggests.  
"Scythe," Regine agrees. "But it'll kill you."  
"How do you know?"  
"This isn't the time to explain," she says, leading them off down the sidewalk in the direction of  
Seth's house. "We've got to get inside."  
"But who are you?" Seth says, following. "Where did you come from? Are there more of you?"  
Regine and Tomasz exchange a glance. It's enough to give him the answer in an instant. He's  
surprised at how sudden his disappointment is. "There aren't. Are there?"  
Regine shakes her head. "Just me and Tommy. And whatever's driving that van."  
"Three of us. That's it?"  
"Three is better than two," Tomasz says. "And much better than one."  
"We figure there have to be more people out there somewhere," Regine says. "It doesn't make  
sense otherwise."  
"Yeah," Seth says. "Because everything else here makes so much sense."  
Tomasz frowns. "But sense is what it does not make."  
"Try not to use irony," Regine says to Seth. "He doesn't understand it."  
"I do, too!" Tomasz protests. "In my language, plenty irony. I could tell you story of the dragon of  
Krakow who –"  
"We need to get inside," Regine says. "I don't think the Driver considers us much of a threat unless  
we get too close, but –"  
"Too close to what?" Seth asks.  
They both look at him, startled. Regine cocks her head at him. "Where do you think you are?"  
Seth says, simply, "Hell."  
"Yes," Tomasz says. "What I say."  
"Well," Regine says, pressing on down the sidewalk, "that's one way of putting it."  
They make their way carefully, walking on the least dusty bits of sidewalk, trying to disguise their  
footprints, but anyone looking for them could still find them pretty easily.  
They'd have to be looking, though.  
"Whatever that . . . thing is," Seth says, "it's never come this way before. Trust me. Nothing's  
driven down these roads for years."  
Regine hmphs. "I'll still feel better when we're in the house."  
"Do you have any food there?" Tomasz asks. Regine shoots him a glance. "What?" he says. "I am  
hungry."  
"Just cans," Seth says. "Soups and old beans and custard."  
"Exactly what we're used to," Regine says.  
"Exactly what we're used to," Regine says.  
They turn the corner at the far end of Seth's street. "That one there, yes?" Tomasz says, pointing.  
Seth stops walking again. "How do you know that? Have you been spying on me?"  
Tomasz's smile falters and even Regine looks uncomfortable.  
"What?" Seth says.  
Regine sighs. "Tommy saw you standing on top of the train station bridge a few days ago."  
"She did not believe me," Tomasz says. "Said that I imagined you." He smiles again. "I did not."  
"We're in a house a couple miles from here," Regine says, gesturing northward, "but we were out  
gathering food and Tommy said he thought he saw someone."  
"We looked for very long time in rain that never stopped," Tomasz says, nodding. "Got very wet."  
"And then we, uh," Regine says, and she actually seems to blush, "we saw you showering. In the  
rain. Out in front of your house."  
Tomasz grins even wider. "You were pulling on your willy!"  
"Tommy!" the girl snaps. Then she frowns at Seth. "Well, you were. And we weren't going to say  
hello when you were busy, and we were hungry and wet, so we went back home and thought we'd  
come back when things weren't so . . ."  
"Private," Tomasz stage-whispers.  
"Rainy," Regine says.  
Seth feels a burning in his throat. "I thought I was alone here. I thought I was completely alone."  
"That is what I thought, too," Tomasz says solemnly. "Until Regine finds me." He smiles again,  
shyly this time. "And now you make three."  
"So we got here this morning," Regine says, "only to find that you were running very, very fast  
toward something in particular." She crosses her arms. "Almost like you had somewhere to go.  
Something to do."  
There's a silence, which Seth doesn't fill.  
"And we could not let the Driver catch you," Tomasz says. "So we followed. And here we all  
are." He shrugs. "Still outside."  
Seth waits a moment without saying anything more, then heads down the street, leading them toward  
his house. He's embarrassed about the shower business, but not as much as he could be. Something's  
still not right about this. These two just happened to be there when he was running toward the hill,  
just happened to stop him before he made contact with the black van, just happened to find the perfect  
place to hide from the Driver?  
He sneaks a peek back as he turns up the path to his front door.  
A short, happy Polish kid and a big, suspicious black girl.  
Did he create them? Because they're just about the last and weirdest thing he'd pick to create.  
He swings open the front door, and they follow him inside. Regine takes a dining chair and Tomasz  
slumps on the settee. "This is a very terrible painting," he says, staring up at the panicked horse above  
the mantel.  
"I'll make something to eat," Seth says. "It won't be much. But while I do, you have to tell me what  
you know."  
"All right," Regine says. "But first you have to tell us something."  
"And what's that?" Seth says, heading toward the kitchen.  
And he hears her ask, "How did you die?"


	34. Chapter 34

"What did you say?"  
"I think you heard the question just fine," Regine says, looking at him firmly, as if setting him a  
challenge. A test he has to pass.  
"How did I die?" Seth repeats, looking back and forth between her and Tomasz. "So you're saying  
. . . You're saying this place really is –"  
"I'm not saying anything," Regine says. "I'm just asking how you died. And your reaction tells me  
you know exactly what I mean."  
"I got struck by lightning!" Tomasz volunteers.  
Regine makes a loud scoffing sound. "You did not."  
"You do not know," Tomasz says. "You were not there."  
"Nobody actually gets struck by lightning. Not even in Poland."  
Tomasz's eyes widen in indignation. "I was not in Poland! How many times I have to say? Mother  
came over for better working and –"  
"I drowned," Seth says, so quietly he thinks they may not have heard him.  
But they stop bickering immediately.  
"Drowned?" Regine says. "Where?"  
Seth furrows his brow. "Halfmarket. It's a little town on the coast of –"  
"No, I mean, where? The bathtub? A swimming pool –?"  
"The ocean."  
She nods, as if this makes sense. "Did you hit your head?"  
"Did I hit my –?" Seth says, and then stops. He touches the back of his skull where it smashed into  
the rocks. "What does that have to do with anything?"  
"I . . ." Regine starts, then looks down at the freshly swept floor Seth left behind this morning. "I  
fell down a flight of stairs. Cracked my head on a step on the way down."  
"And you woke up here?"  
She nods.  
"It was the lightning for me!" Tomasz says happily. "It is like getting punched on your entire body  
all at one time!"  
"You did not get struck by lightning," Regine says.  
"Then you did not fall down stairs!" Tomasz says, upset bending his voice, a tone Seth recognizes  
from a hundred and one fights with Owen.  
"So you both . . . ?" Seth doesn't finish the sentence.  
"Died," Regine says. "In a way that caused a specific injury."  
Seth feels the back of his head again, where he hit it on the rocks. He remembers the horrible  
finality of that collision, could swear he still feels the bones breaking, in a way from which there was  
no return.  
Until he woke up here.  
There are no broken bones now, of course, that was another place, another him, and all he can feel  
is the still-brutal shortness of his hair, something that Regine and Tomasz have clearly been here long  
enough to outgrow. There's nothing else unusual, just the inward curve of his neck leading up to the  
outward curve of his skull.  
Regine looks at Tomasz. "Show him," she says.  
Tomasz leaps up from the settee. "Lean down, please," he says. Seth stoops to one knee and allows  
Tomasz to take his hand. He splays Seth's fingers so the first two are a particular distance apart.  
Tomasz sticks out a little nubbin of tongue as he concentrates, and once more, he reminds Seth so  
much of Owen, Seth feels his chest contract.  
"Here," Tomasz says, placing Seth's fingers on a particular stretch of bone just behind his left ear.  
"Can you feel that?"  
"Feel what?" Seth says. It's exactly where his head struck the rock, but there's nothing unusual  
there, nothing but a stretch of –  
There's something. A rise in the bone so slight as to almost not be present, so slight he didn't feel it  
seconds ago when pressing in exactly the same place.  
A rise in the bone.  
Leading to a narrow notch in that same bone.  
"What?" Seth whispers. "How . . . ?"  
He swears it wasn't there before. But there it is now, subtle but clear, the rise and the notch almost  
like a completely natural extension of his skull.  
Almost.  
"That's where you hit your head?" Regine asks.  
"Yes," Seth answers. "You?"  
Regine nods.  
"And that is where the lightning punched me!" Tomasz says.  
"Or whatever happened," Regine mumbles.  
"What is it?" Seth asks, feeling around on the same spot on his right side to see if there's another  
one. There isn't.  
"We think it is a kind of connection," Tomasz says.  
"Connection to what?"  
Neither of them answers.  
"Connection to what?" Seth says again.  
"What have your dreams been like?" Regine says.  
Seth frowns at her. Then he has to look away, feeling the vividness of his dreams in a way that  
causes his skin to flush.  
"The dreamings," Tomasz says, patting Seth's back sympathetically. "They are not easy."  
"Like you're not just seeing it all again," Regine says. "Like you're actually there, back in time  
somehow, reliving it."  
Seth is surprised to find his eyes filling, his throat choking. "What is it? Why does it happen?"  
She glances at Tomasz, then back at Seth. "We're not sure," she says carefully.  
"But you have an idea."  
She nods. "The things you dream. They're important?"  
"Yes," Seth says. "More than I want them to be."  
"Some of it is good," Tomasz says. "But good in painful way."  
Seth nods.  
"But that, all that –" Regine makes a gesture in the air, capturing in a single twist of her fingers all  
the dreams he's had –"all that is not your whole life."  
"What?"  
"There's more. There's much, much more." She gets a grim set to her mouth. "And you've forgotten  
it."  
For some reason Seth can't quite put a finger on, this makes him angry. "Don't tell me I've forgotten,"  
he says, fierce enough to surprise everyone, even himself. "I remember too much, is the problem. If I  
could forget some of these things, then . . ."  
"Then what?" Regine says. "You wouldn't have drowned?" She says the word with a sarcastic  
snap, challenging him with her eyes.  
"Did you fall down those stairs," he hears himself saying. "Or were you pushed?"  
"Whoa," Tomasz says, taking a step back. "Something has happened. I have missed it. Why are we  
fighting?"  
"We're not fighting," Regine says. "We're getting to know each other."  
"People who are getting to know each other share information," Seth says. "All you're giving me  
are riddles and hints about how much more you know than I do." He stands, his voice rising with him.  
"Why do I have a brand-new notch in my head?"  
Tomasz starts to answer, "It is not brand –" but Seth keeps going.  
"Why did I crawl out of a coffin in the house where I grew up?"  
Regine looks surprised. "You grew up here? In this house?"  
But Seth is barely listening. "And where is everyone else? Who are you, anyway? How do I know  
you're not working with that thing in the van?"  
This causes a lot more outrage than he was expecting.  
"We are NOT!" Tomasz shouts.  
"You don't know anything!" Regine says.  
"Then tell me!"  
"Fine!" she says. "Tomasz isn't the first person I saw here. He was the second."  
Seth feels strangely victorious. "So there are others?"  
"Only the one, before I found Tomasz."  
"And thank the Holy Mother she did," Tomasz says, nodding vigorously. "Was in very bad way."  
"But before then," Regine says, "there was another. A woman. I knew her one day. One day. And  
then I watched her die. She pushed me to safety and let the Driver catch her so it wouldn't catch me. I  
watched it kill her. That baton has some kind of charge in it. It kills you. And then the Driver takes  
your body away."  
Tomasz frowns at Seth. "She does not like to talk about it."  
"So, screw you," Regine continues. "How do we know you're not –"  
She stops.  
Because they've noticed the sound.  
A distant purring, a sound of the wind that isn't the wind.  
The sound of an engine.  
Growing louder as it approaches.


	35. Chapter 35

They turn to the windows, though the blinds are still down and nothing can be seen of the street  
beyond.  
"No," Regine says, standing up. "It never follows this far. If we get away, it always stops."  
The sound of the engine grows louder, two, maybe three streets away.  
And getting closer.  
Tomasz scowls at Seth. "You were shouting! It heard you!"  
"No, it didn't," Regine says. "It's just searching, street by street, trying to find us. Now, be quiet."  
They're silent, but there's a shift in the sound as it obviously turns a corner –  
And starts driving down the road to Seth's house.  
But Seth is thinking.  
They only heard the engine after he spoke the words. After he accused them of working with it.  
And now here it is.  
I did this, he thinks. Did I do this?  
"Our footprints are all over," Tomasz says. "It will know we are here."  
"It's driving," Regine says. "It may pass by too quickly to notice –"  
But she doesn't finish.  
Because the engine has come to a stop right outside.  
Seth feels Tomasz's hand slip into his own, gripping it the way Owen did every time they had to cross  
a street. Seth can feel the tension vibrating up from the little, stubby fingers, can see the nails that are  
bitten painfully down to the quick, can see the wide-open, terrified eyes looking back up from  
Tomasz's face.  
So much like Owen.  
"It'll pass," Regine says. "It'll drive on and out. Just nobody move, okay?"  
They don't move. Neither does the sound of the engine.  
"What is it doing?" Tomasz asks, his voice a desperate whisper.  
And Seth sees again the craziness of his hair, an avalanche of wiry tangle. Again, just like Owen's.  
Seth looks at Regine, his mind racing.  
Everything about this world has felt small. Everything has felt like he was hiding in a tiny pocket of  
a place with walls that pressed in from every side, in the form of memories he couldn't shake, a  
burnt-out wasteland that made a border, and now these two, showing up just in time to stop him from  
going any farther, bringing him back to this same stupid house at the very moment he tried to leave it  
for good, and who knows, maybe even bringing this van after them.  
"Something about this isn't right," he says.  
"What?" Tomasz asks.  
Seth squeezes Tomasz's hand, then lets it go. "I'm going to find out what it is."  
"You're what?" Regine says.  
He starts to cross the sitting room toward the blinds. "I'm going to check and see what's  
happening."  
Tomasz moves over to Regine and holds her hand now.  
Tomasz moves over to Regine and holds her hand now.  
Seth stops and looks at them curiously. "You're not here, are you?" he says, the words coming out,  
unexpected.  
Regine frowns. "Beg pardon?"  
"I don't think you're really here. I don't think any of this is really here."  
The engine still thrums outside.  
"If we're not here," Regine says, holding his stare, "then neither are you."  
"You think that's an answer?" Seth says. "You think that's proof?"  
"I don't care what you think. If you let that thing see us, we're dead."  
But Seth is shaking his head. "I feel like I'm beginning to understand. I'm finally beginning to  
understand what this place is." He turns back to the window. "And how it works."  
"What are you doing, Mr. Seth?" Tomasz says. "You said you were just going to check."  
"Seth, please," Regine says, and he hears her say to Tomasz, "Go, run, there's got to be a back way

"There's nothing to run from," Seth says. "There's nothing here that can hurt me, is there?"  
With an almost casual swipe, he pulls up the blinds. The sun blasts into the dim room, and Seth  
squints in the brightness –  
And the Driver punches a fist through the window, slamming it into Seth's chest, sending him flying  
across the room with seemingly impossible force.


End file.
